Hello B4X Community!
This is my second post on this forum (I know, shame on me!) and I'm doing it to mark a turning point for me as a developer.
To give you some context of how I found B4X, it all started in 2017 when I joined the company that I work for. They had a project for me to build a mobile app that will communicate with a piece of hardware. I had no experience with mobile but I had experience with c#, so the logic step for me was to use Xamarin to do the job. I have a colleague that wrote the firmware to that piece of hardware and a Java API to communicate with it for his testing purposes. He gave me the jar and the documentation for me to start the development and, since I couldn't use the jar in Xamarin, I wrote the whole code from scratch (wrong move, I should have looked for an alternative first but I didn't and that was it). Several months passed, I developed the app but that moment stuck on my mind and I started to look for an alternative that would allow me to use already built and battle-tested java code in the future for the projects and that was when I found B4X!
I digged the site, read the documentation and bought a B4A license right away! (At that time B4A was not free but that didn't stop me as I found the price to be pretty fair).
Off-topic.: I was amazed to know when it became open source and that made me consider it even more!
I started to experiment with it, baby steps just like with everything that is new to us and started to keep an eye on the forum as I have been doing when I have time.
But one day I decided to really give it a shot professionally. One day at work after lunch, a colleague approached me and asked me to make an app asap for another colleague of another department.
I accepted the challenge and, as I had little time to do it, I thought to myself: "let's see how much of a RAD tool B4X really is!" (I used B4J this time as it was a desktop application)
And I was blown away! ?
Nice built-in interface designer, kiss principles, no overengineering and re-invent the wheel, two searches on the forum (that really works well!) and the app was ready by the end of the afternoon!!
I delivered the app the next morning (my colleague still probably thinks that I spent the night coding to do it) ? and after that, to myself, I paused a bit just to think in what happened:
"Wait! I just coded an app in an afternoon!! If I had used B4A for my first project here, how much time would I have saved developing that mobile app?" ?
My role and development focus on the company changed since then and I have been away from the forum from quite some time now because of it.
But that experience and thought stayed with me.
I'm now returning to "fullstack" and I want to embrace B4X once and for all but for that I just need clarification on one subject:
Can I use any jar I want in B4A, B4i and B4J? There are any quirks or limitations that I should be aware? (If I should post the question in a different thread just let me know)
This is very important for me because of the story that I told you before and because I will need it for future projects like that.
Sorry for the post being a bit long!
I hope you guys are well and safe and thank you all for this amazing community. As I said I was away but I check my mail every week for B4X to keep me updated with the latest and greatest and
it's very nice to see all these awesome developments and interactions! ?
You will see more of me in the future as I will invest in B4X as my development platform (with code and donations when I can)
Thanks
@Erel for this amazing suite of RAD tools and awesome support!
Cheers to all!
