Adventures in B4J

I’ve been poking about with some alternative tools – probably more than I have in the last decade or more.

Previously I’d look at them for “competitive intelligence” reasons. To see where they were, where they were going and what things they did better.

Now that focus has shifted entirely. I, like many others, have been looking at other tools with an eye towards maybe moving away from Xojo. Thats not likely to happen ASAP but there are some promising options I’ve looked at.

B4J is one.

Its visual designer behaves differently than Xojo’s but its not entirely foreign. And one thing you’;ll find different is that the B4J style of working is that you have to add references to controls & windows & the events they handle in a manner that is different than Xojo’s.

Its not better, or worse, just different.

Last night I sat and created a simple web browser app which in B4J took me about as long to create as it did in Xojo. Its really simple with a text field, a button, and an html viewer.

So that easy stuff just works – exactly as you’d expect.

I’ll report more as I tinker more.