Android Question Need motivation for using B4A

[Indic Software]

Hello,

I am trying to learn B4A but somehow I am not able to gain enough confidence to really invest time. Please understand here money is no the question. Here spending precious time in learning and developing app in B4A is more important.

Before I go any further I would like to give some information so that the community can help me motivate myself and move along with B4A.

But before I go any further I would like say that I am not trying to push or advertise any third product here. I just want help to get rid of my confusion and come to a sane decision.

My preferred to program even today is VB6 and B4A is similar to VB6 but somehow my gut feeling tells me that I may not be able to achieve what I want using B4A. I may be wrong. In fact I want to be proved wrong here...

Currently I am using a very expensive tool called WinDev Mobile (WM) for developing Mobile Apps for Android, iOS as well as Windows. In WM I have one single code base which I can compile for different targets. WM is huge and it provides many features out of the box (so to say) but when I want to do something that is not out of the box I am out of luck as it does not allow me to do that easily. For example I one of the out of the box feature that I want to implement is OnDemand loading of images. That is I want to load images only when they scroll into the view in a separate thread. But I am not able to achieve this..... (This is just one such limitation. There are others that I will discuss here as the post will get rather toooo long.)

Because of this I want to switch over to B4A (as I want complete flexibility) but, but... I am not able to determine whether I will be able to recreate the following Android app with all their currently implemented features in B4A or not.

1. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mycompany.pushti.marg.sahitya

2. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.infovalley.HarshidShahClasses

Both these apps are also submitted to Apple Store and we are waiting for approval.

The First app is currently being updated but I personally wish to build it from scratch in B4A. It retrieves all its data from a remote web in which a web service is implemented. This web service is designed to return data as per queries sent by the app. Secondly the app loads images that are stored on the remote server. Please install the check the app for better details.

The Second app is completed and there are no plans to update it but I would like to know if it is possible to build such an app that retrieves all the data from remote MySQL server and store nothing in the mobile phone except login information. What you may not be able to understand it full functionality just by using it. It is designed to support multiple types of log in. As the app is for an education institution it allows Students and student's Parents to login. So based on who logs in different set of features are made available.

To try this app please use following login details:
Login Name: 8kinjal
Password: Asckinjal


I hope the community will help me clear my doubts and guide me as to how to achieve a particular feature, so that I can be up and running with B4A as quickly as possible.

Regards,

 

[gjt]

I would say "...the winner is B4X..."

Agreed

 

[Indic Software]

Indic Software,

I also recommend the Object Browser by Vader. It is an excellent "help" type program that will help you search for commands, methods, properties etc..
https://www.b4x.com/android/forum/t...cumentation-b4x-object-browser.25682/#content

Going through Klaus's Beginner's Guide and User's Guide is a must do. When you get through those, there is also the tutorials https://www.b4x.com/android/forum/forums/tutorials-examples.27/ that is full of wonderful stuff. Going through the tutorials is like getting a new birthday present delivered to you every day.

Enjoy!

Thanks for the tip friend.

Will surely download and install it.

 

[Indic Software]

Clarion..... the first software I really got my teeth into...

From what little research I have done Clarion is a dead product which has changed quite a few hands and not currently actively developed.

But it seems to have huge following. Anyways WinDev is a natural alternative to ageing Clarion for modern development.

Regards,

 

[gjt]

Clarion is a dead product which has changed quite a few hands and not currently actively developed

woe you would certainly raise a few hackles in some quarters
Actually that's incorrect, it is still actively developed (although not at the pace I would like to see).

 

[Widget]

woe you would certainly raise a few hackles in some quarters
Actually that's incorrect, it is still actively developed (although not at the pace I would like to see).

Clarion 2.1 was a revolutionary product in the 1980's because with its template technology it could create a DOS app in record time and the apps worked great the very first time. I'm confident there are still Clarion 2.1 apps out there running on old DOS machines today.

Then the company got overzealous and decided to create Clarion 3 for DOS around 1992 that was a total rewrite and a total waste of time. Unfortunately it had 6,000 reported bugs in the first release. I should know, I reported a lot of them. That turned a lot of people off including me and their sales tanked. Clarion 3 templates became very complicated compared to Clarion 2.1. It crashed a lot causing developers to lose all of their work, often corrupting the application so they had to revert to a backup copy (oh joy!). They should have sold crash helmets with each copy. Debugging the app was a nightmare because most of the code was generated from templates and the debugger was a joke.

Then they released Clarion for Windows and that too had major reliability problems. They kept losing customers. Working a day building an app with Clarion for Dos or Windows felt a lot like riding a Brahma bull at a rodeo. You know you're going to get thrown off and your head stomped on (app crash), you just don't know how long it will take. Sales nosedived and the company was broken into 2 and was sold off as a shadow of its former self. A lot of companies have followed a similar path and end up on the trash heap of great ideas. Another product that comes to mind is Morfik that has was a brilliant product when it first came out, but has been on life support for the past few years. Their programmers are still hanging on, thinking that one day they will get an update to Morfik, not realizing the product is now part of the walking dead.

There are some paths down memory lane like this that would make even the great Stephen King whimper if he was a programmer.

 

[Indic Software]

Finally I have purchased B4A.

Thanks to all for your motivation and community's confidence in B4A.

Regards,

 

[Star-Dust]

Finally....