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MBS Xojo Plugins for iOS and Android

For a few months now we have been working closely with Xojo, Inc. to port all the MBS Xojo Plugins to the iOS target in Xojo with the upcoming Xojo Plugin SDK for iOS. As it turned out last week the SDK is quite portable, so with building a C++ version with Android system headers allows us to generate an Android version, too!

As of today things compile well and most of the plugin parts including DynaPDF, Encryption, ChartDirector and SQL plugins are building for both iOS and Android. This includes building ARM for 32-bit and 64-bit for both targets. For iOS we target iOS 10.4 or later, but it is yet unclear what version Xojo will require as minimum with the new plugin SDK. For Android we support all version from the last years. The market there is so fragmented, we have to go back to tasty Donuts to cover a serious amount of devices out there. But still recent Ice Cream Marshmallow and Jelly Bean Oreo versions are our main targets.

iOS is working well on device, but testing for Android requires the upcoming Xojo 2018r1.4 release, which is not yet publicly available. Testing all the functions on all the devices, all Android versions in all combinations will take some time, so we expect to buy at least 20 test devices and hire a couple of testers. Nevertheless we expect to test all 60000 documented MBS Plugin functions within the next century.

The new plugin SDK uses the newer data types, so all classes now use text instead of string and auto instead of variants. In cases where this causes trouble, we may need to overload methods with xojo.core.memoryblock to take memory directly. Although array handling and passing big data structures seems to be difficult, we may switch to pass them as JSON encoded blocks for simplicity. Performance may be catastrophic, but at least you can easily read the data in the debugger.

If you like to join to sign up for the beta, please contact us soon via our contact forms. Deadline to sign up is 1st April.

PS: This was our joke for 1st April 2018. There is no beta test as there is no plugin SDK for iOS and Android is not yet available. The biggest plugin in space...
01 04 18 - 08:35