Xojo

The Xojo programming environment is developed and commercially marketed by Xojo, Inc of Austin, Texas for software development targeting Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, x86 Linux, iOS, as well as the web and Raspberry Pi. Xojo uses a proprietary object-oriented BASIC dialect, also known as Xojo.

Developers can use Xojo to create applications by using drag-and-drop to build their user interface and then use one programming language to enable the functionality of their application cross platform.

History

In 1997 FYI Software, founded by Geoff Perlman, bought CrossBasic, which had been marketed by its author Andrew Barry as a shareware product. CrossBasic got its name from its ability to compile the same programming code for Mac OS and the Java virtual machine (although the integrated development environment was Mac only). A public beta was released in April 1996. The CrossBasic name was trademarked by another company, so the product was renamed REALbasic.

Prior to REALbasic version 2, the Java target was dropped and later replaced with a Windows target and database support. Windows builds contained many bugs when finally released, and it was very difficult to write applications that ran on both Mac OS and Windows. The option to compile for Linux was added in 2005 and the IDE was ported to Windows and as a free public beta for Linux platforms. The new IDE sported a new user interface redesigned to more closely resemble Xcode.