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FEATURE

Upgrading Xojo

Should you upgrade your project?

Issue: 16.6 (November/December 2018)
Author: Jim Meyer
Author Bio: Jim has been programming since taking a Fortran course as part of his Mechanical Engineering degree in the late 1960s. Most of his work since then has been with accounting, publishing and content management systems but also as a hobby he works with sport statistics. After co-founding a newspaper publishing software company in the mid 1980s he semi-retired in 2000. About that same time he was introduced to Xojo (REALbasic back then) which he uses almost daily for both fun and profit. His free time is spent traveling and racing his Laser sailboat.
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Excerpt of article text...

I am a big believer in the old adage, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." In part, this is why I typically do not upgrade my projects to the latest version of Xojo with each of my app's releases. That is, unless there is a compelling reason to do so. I will, however, almost always start any new project with the current Xojo release.

By not changing the Xojo version with each version of my release I can concentrate on any patches or improvements in my app and not any changes imposed by Xojo or the plugins I use. Depending on my changes, I also have a lot more confidence in my app and require much less testing than I would had I changed versions.

There is, of course, a downside to this methodology. At any one time I typically have up to three versions of Xojo that I am using and need to keep straight. It is easy to open a project with the wrong version. Also, when those compelling reasons to upgrade start to add up, I have a lot more work to do all at once.

I started my first Xojo (REALbasic back then) project in 2000. It is an app designed to score college basketball games from court side in real-time. Currently used by several major Division I basketball teams, it tracks all the required NCAA stats, generates printed reports, updates scoreboards, and FTPs XML files to ESPN, CBS, and other media outlets as the game progresses.

At the core is a pretty simple SQLite database with tables for the teams, players, and game data. The stats are input via touch screen using standard Xojo buttons and a canvas for shot location. It is pure Xojo code; there are no plugins. Customers currently use both Mac and Windows. One customer is currently using a SurfacePro.

My first released version was compiled with REALbasic 3.5.2, but it was not long before I had upgraded to 4.5.2, and eventually 5.5.3. Bugs in those versions (Windows in particular) and the adoption of much faster SQLite as the internal database led me to 2006R3 and then to the "current" 2007R4. At that point the app was pretty mature and my occasional releases were limited to adapting NCAA rule changes and a few new features. 2007R4 also was the last version to build a single executable file for each Mac and Windows.

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