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FEATURE
Introducing PowerXS (Part 1)
A new tool to make XojoScript easier to use
Issue: 18.4 (July/August 2020)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Author Bio: Marc taught himself programming in high school when he bought his first computer but had no money for software. He's had fun learning ever since.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 29,248
Starting Page Number: 12
Article Number: 18402
Resource File(s):
project18402.zip Updated: 2020-07-01 11:01:37
Related Web Link(s):
http://www.designwrite.com/oneclick/index.html
http://www.xdevmag.com/browse/7.1/7112
http://www.xdevmag.com/browse/10.4/10409
http://www.xdevmag.com/browse/16.4/16402
Excerpt of article text...
As many of you may know, I've been a huge fan of XojoScript for decades. I've given several XojoScript presentations at Xojo conferences and written about it many times here in
xDev Magazine (issues 7.1, 9.1, 10.1, 10.4, 16.2, 16.4, 18.2, to name a few). XojoScript is literally my favorite feature of Xojo—possibly because I came to REALbasic so many years ago after programming in scripting environments (particularly the much-missed OneClick—http://www.designwrite.com/oneclick/index.html
).XojoScript is great, but it's still a bit intimidating to new Xojo users. One of the biggest obstacles is the fact that the language is only a subset of what we know as Xojo (see Figure 1). Most of Xojo is really frameworks—system objects such as folderitems, controls and user interface elements, and even language features like dictionaries (see
https://docs.xojo.com/UserGuide:XojoScript_Language
for XojoScript's capabilities).When beginners begin with XojoScript, they often get frustrated because the code "isn't Xojo"—they can't use the
date
object and many other standard functions. I've written and spoken about how to work around these limitations by writing your own XojoScript wrapper classes, essentially scripting features that duplicate those found within Xojo, but that's extra work, is complicated, and adds too much overhead for beginners to bother with.So today I'm going to write about PowerXS. I was going to talk about PowerXS at Xojo.Connect this past spring, but that event was canceled due to the pandemic, so I'll introduce it here instead.
PowerXS is a new tool I am creating—I say
am because it's a work in progress—that makes it much easier to add framework functionality to XojoScript.Be Forewarned
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