Xojo 2022r4 released
Short before year's end, we get a 4th release for Xojo for 2022. Download here. Release Notes here. This release brings a couple of important bug fixes and new features, so let's dig into it:Linux 64-bit for ARM
Finally we get 64-bit ARM support for Linux. And if you like to try it, be sure to install our MBS Plugins 22.6pr3 (or newer) to get support for the new platform. We worked on this for a year now and already updated all plugins to build for it. This includes MBS Xojo ChartDirector Plugin for our chart engine. The MBS Xojo XL Plugin is not yet updated for Linux 64-bit ARM as we plan to do this with the upcoming 4.1 release of LibXL. Let us know if you run into a class or function not working on Linux 64-bit on ARM, so we can check. Please try it for your desktop, console and web projects.
For other plugin vendors, it looks like Björn from Einhugur.com is also busy to update.
Plugins
This new release should make code using plugins a little bit faster, which you may notice in tight loops calling plugin functions a lot. When a Xojo method is called, a stack overflow check is performed automatically by Xojo, which may lead to a StackOverflowException. But then for calling a plugin method, it used to do the stack check again for each call. This is now gone and we may enjoy a speedup. Depending on what the plugin function did, it may be something in the range of 5 to 10% of CPU time spent on the stack check. We saw it a lot with our XML parsing code, which creates a lot of XMLNodeMBS objects and the stack check was done in the constructor calls.
A little change on the database plugins is to not include the Oracle plugin by default, since it may not load if you didn't install the right libraries from Oracle. You can still grab it from the Extras/Database Plugin Resources folder if needed. Or you better use MBS Xojo SQL Plugin right away to dynamically load libraries and connect to 15 different database types including Oracle.
Web
This release contains over 40 changes to the web framework alone with lot of bug fixes. Anyone using Web 2 may be very happy for this love. Interesting may be the better cleanup of disconnected sessions to remove some annoying memory leaks. And you can now customise the style for the WebListbox control and the WebMessageDialogs. The WebListBox is also now visible in the layout editor, so you see how it may look like as a preview. We still patiently wait for help to move older projects over from Web 1 to 2.
iOS
While Xojo continues their work on Android, they also put in some love for iOS target. Nothing big, just a few bug fixes and minor enhancements like an Enabled property for MobileTextArea. Please note that with App Store submission, you have to use a recent Xcode version and for that a Xojo version compatible to that.
Android
Speaking of mobile targets, we see progress on Xojo's efforts to implement their Android support. The last months showed intensive bug fixing to prepare for a public beta, but that is not yet there. If you like to try the current builds, you can join the testers group (email hello@xojo.com for help). While a lot of people wish for more features, Xojo Inc. still needs to get the basics right for their transpiler, the framework and the IDE.
Windows
Since Windows versions 7 and 8 are deprecated by Microsoft for years, it is time to sunset the support for them. For some time now Xojo has toggles to turn on/off which versions are supported by an application to let Windows know about this. The version 7 and 8 toggles are now off by default. Windows 8.1 and 10 are on by default.
As you may know, the Xojo roadmap lists new Windows controls for some time. The problem is, that those controls may require Windows 10 or newer, so eventually Xojo may drop support for Windows 7 and 8.x and require Windows 10. At that point, they can safely use those new Windows 10 controls. I am not sure whether other planned changes for controls wait for this or are not for Windows like the planned toolbar improvements.
Our plugins support in general Windows 7 and up. But some classes may either not work on old Windows versions or require a newer version. For example since user notifications are only available since Windows 8, you need that version for using our WinUserNotificationMBS class. And the new WinBluetoothLE classes will not work on version before Windows 10.
Others
There are a few more smaller changes like a choice how to compare with String.Compare function. And you can now change minimum macOS version in build scripts. The SQLite used in Xojo now enables extensions like JSON. We had that for years and nice to see Xojo catch up.
In general we recommend to try the new version for your projects. It seems to work well for our desktop projects. Download here. Release Notes here.