Comparison between B4X x Xamarin x Native Languages x React

Hello everyone,

First of all, I have to say that I'm the biggest fan of the B4X platform since the beginning , how many outriders here too!

I live in London and what is much around here are mobile developer jobs in Native (ObjectiveC / Java), Xamarin, React, but it was not possible to find anything yet with B4X.

I already convinced last year to develop an application in B4A / B4i, but it's very complicated to try to explain that the B4X platform is extremely exceptional, easy to learn, clean code, small package, etc etc etc.

So I suggest setting up a comparative table between the main market tools and B4X because if we advertise this, companies will understand that they are really doing a great deal, implementing this new way of developing applications.

@Erel can help to start with this... is important for everyone here.

That would be like Volvo comparing their safety features against all other car manufacturers... Bias!

The best choice would be a REAL article in one of the mainstream specialized magazines, but real in-depth, not just scratching the surface like the existing ones...

If @Erel could convince any of the Notable Devs that lurk the likes of XDA, and othe mega-forums to take a deep dive within the B4X suite, and he/she actually wrote an article about it, then some buzz could be made.

Most of us found b4x (former b4ppc) by chance just googling and dreaming such a suite could exist...

What about some crazy idea like replicating our forums questions and answers in stackoverflow for example? Double work... but who knows...

A crazier idea ... Get the people at stackoverflow to add a B4x section...

[EDIT] seems they organize themselves by tags, and I found at least b4J as a in use tag...
Still stack overflow doesn't seem like an "opinion maker" type of forum...

Cableguy said:

A crazier idea ... Get the people at stackoverflow to add a B4x section...

Click to expand...

I did try to use Stackoverflow for B4X questions several years ago. There was a prominent link at the top of the forum that asked members to post in Stackoverflow. The experiment ended after about 2 months. It didn't go so well. There are many advantages to having our own full controlled forum. You cannot build a community with Stackoverflow. It is 100% focused on questions and answers.

Cableguy said:

Still stack overflow doesn't seem like an "opinion maker" type of forum...

Click to expand...

Exactly what I said...
Google Now (I think that's what its called) would be a good place to showcase B4X... I'm not much of a news reader, but since I have it set only to my center of iterests, I get some quite interesting feeds...

I think based on my experience, one of the major hurdles to convince large companies or larger clients about the power of B4X is the fact that it's syntax is similar to Visual Basic, which is something i honestly don't understand why. For example in my case I work at Snapchat, and i work with a lot of firmware and software engineers who are extremely good at what they do, just recently i created an app for a product we are working on which tests all the important hardware aspects of the product, i was able to create this app and demo it for them in 1 day, they were very impressed and when asked what language i had used to develop it i told them about B4A, they were at first very excited and as soon as they found out the syntax is Basic all the excitement and all the big fuss went away, I was very bummed out then they had someone else create the same App in Android Studio, same functionality, same everything, but for some reason they trusted it more since it was written in Android Studio using pure Java, to be honest it didn't make any sense, i still use it at work for my purposes but it's been really hard convincing others that essentially the results are the same.

Walter

To be fair, B4X also lacks stuff pro’s use all the time. Mainly inheritance and interfaces, which make a whole lot design patterns very hard to do (or do some very clumsy coding). Not trusting a language for a BASIC like syntax is very stupid none the less.

MathiasM said:

To be fair, B4X also lacks stuff pro’s use all the time. Mainly inheritance and interfaces, which make a whole lot design patterns very hard to do (or do some very clumsy coding). Not trusting a language for a BASIC like syntax is very stupid none the less.

Click to expand...

Just today I was reading a discussion where the commentators were discussing SOLID as a development
methodology. On it a lot of the people were saying that the more experience they have, the less time they have for adherence
to stuff like this. That it's KISS and YAGNI and avoiding premature optimisation that are the principles to follow.
And inheritance is now evil!

I totally follow you on the KISS an YAGNI part, But DRY is also a principle I like to follow. Altough I have to say, duck typing in B4X solves like 95% of all my problems when designing my application in B4X. I just want to point out there is a reason why some people may not like B4X: A lot of the stuff they do all the time, is just different in B4X because a lot of people use high level, very abstract frameworks etc which are hard to reproduce without the things I said.

Who cares if B4X is not on top of the charts ?

As an independent developer, I consider it a competitive advantage

MitchBu said:

Who cares if B4X is not on top of the charts ?

As an independent developer, I consider it a competitive advantage

Click to expand...

I totally agree

you are totally right!