You all know me as a Xojo fanatic, but lately I lost a bit of interest because the focus of the last year was so much about Apple, and Windows/Linux was a bit forgotten.
So I got back to my other favorite, B4X. And what a pleasant ride it has been so far! It truly is a far to little known gem with so much power under the hood. Creating apps for Android, iOS, Desktop and Server apps is a blast.
Being able to share code between devices, having a simple but powerful (free) IDE, a very active community and a developer that really listens was quite refreshing.
My next project was writing a Material Design framework for Web Apps, without having to write a single line of HTML, CSS or JavaScript. And quickly, it became obvious B4J was the one tool that could do it. ABMaterial was born.
Using very little code, you’re able to write beautiful (based on Material CSS) and powerful (B4J really stands out here) WebApps. The enthusiastic crowd at the forum has pushed me through several nights continuing to write on the framework and has made me, although some polishing is still needed, a very happy camper.
It will be very useful to write WebApps (automatically adapting to the screen size of your device), and I even see it to be great to write nice interfaces for your Raspberry Pi projects. It consists of 25+ ‘themeable’ controls and some easy-to-use helpers to design your layouts.
To prove B4J is really on edge with the latest technologies, Erels latest release 4.0 for Christmas now supports HTTP/2. Benchmarks showed a big difference in speed and will undoubtedly be very useful for mobile devices.
I’ve set up a live demo of ABMaterial on my modest media center computer here. So, be gentle with her…
Or if you want to try it out yourself, head to the B4X website, download your free copy of B4J and go to the forum to download the ABMaterial framework. The current ‘public’ version is 1.03. Donators get updates (1.04 as at time of writing) about 2 to 3 weeks beforehand so I’m able to better control questions/feature requests or bugs (aaarrhh!).
I wish you all some very happy Holidays and I hope I’ll see you all next year for some more fun programming projects!
Alwaysbusy
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