No rage, no criticism, just take a look at http://www.elementscompiler.com/elements/oxygene/vs/delphi.aspx.
No rage, no criticism, just take a look at http://www.elementscompiler.com/elements/oxygene/vs/delphi.aspx.
http://www.elementscompiler.com/elements/oxygene/vs/delphi.aspx
http://www.elementscompiler.com/elements/oxygene/vs/delphi.aspx
Marketing war in a glass of water.
ReplyDeleteA saving grace for Delphi is the availability of old manuals and of some more recent books, by Holliston, and Hodges, and the work in progress from Marco Cantu.
ReplyDeleteWhere might we find similar for Oxygene?
I think they're right that the days of "native" have gone, as are the days of "ships with its own platform libraries". These days you need to run on whatever giant morass of structure the platform uses, especially if it's Java or dotnet.
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty happy to see RemObjects so focussed on cannibalising the Delphi market. It's clear that even this sort of direct competition won't give Embarc the kick it needs, but it might eventually give us a usable multiplatform Pascal-based GUI development environment.
Meanwhile... I must remember to donate some money to the people who make the languages and IDEs that I use.
while Oxygene certainly has it's place in the market, I never felt the need to use or even try it, maybe failed with marketing(?)
ReplyDeletewhen it comes to Windows Desktop, Delphi/FPC+Lazarus is truly RAD; even if not always the right tool for the job, but it would be the fastest to ship to customer;
when it comes to mobile, use their tools, any "multi-mobile platform tool" is going to fail you sooner(hopefully) or later(ouch, invested so much effort...), walk the learning curve of the platform, it's well worth it and it brings in ROI faster than you can imagine and from there on, you're only going to profit;
I actually selected Firemonkey because it is NOT platform native. Write once run everywhere. I don't have time to write the same app 4 times. Only other NOT platform native solutions like Adobe AIR are viable competitors.
ReplyDeleteI was once RemObjects customer. Not anymore.
ReplyDeleteIn general the writer is right. Delphi is deprecated. It's sadly true. As an app developer I'd never use anything else but the native UI stack. Users don't like these UIs with a different look and feel. Amazon, Twitter, Facebook and lots of others have thrown away their non native JavaScript apps and replaced them by truly native UIs.
ReplyDeleteBeside that UI thing the quality and maintenance Embarcadero offers doesn't feel good. Over several months paying customers weren't able to submit their iOS apps to the store using a stable compiler. Delphi needs to aim truly UIs and should sell this FireMonkey adventure.
Christopher Wosinski Not every company has Amazon, Twitter or Facebook resources to pay dedicated teams to create "native" apps.
ReplyDeleteBut IMHO HTML5 apps are more easy to write for mobile, and package via PhoneGap, or even without any app packaging, just a web app manifest (which works offline - but you do not have any plugin).
But beware: if you say "Delphi is dead", you are dead! ;)
Not saying the support is comprehensive, but when that marketing page claims (in bold text) 'FireMonkey does not use the platform's native UI controls', that's only somewhat true nowadays, because there's the option to use key native controls on iOS.
ReplyDeleteAgree with a priori post. The point of Delphi + fmx is that I only build the gui / db / networking code once, at least for Mac/windows it does seems to pull it off. I haven't tried mobile yet .
ReplyDeleteA lot of this is valid, but Oxygene does you no good if you want to do RAD development. The only reason to use Oxygene is if you want the Pascal syntax and need true-native on each platform. I used it for a while, and while it has many strengths, ultimately it was not what I needed at the time. You have to do so much more "manually" -- that's fine but not exactly a feature point. Also, while this is not all that important: the bitter ranting of RemObjects spokespeople can get very, very tiresome. Even this article reeks of bitterness. Better to aggressively market your strengths than to try to talk down Delphi, IMO.
ReplyDelete+A Bouchez I don't say Delphi is dead. I say it's deprecated. It's a big difference. For new projects there is not a single reason to use Delphi except the team wants to use it. It's not the price, not the features, not the libraries you get and especially not the cross platform UI results that leads a team towards Delphi. Delphi has nothing to do with Rapid Application Development anymore. RAD was different twenty years ago. In that time it was great to have a Wysiwyg designer on Windows. Nowadays you need the ability to easily plugin third party libraries and replace them by others. You need to get easy to use refactoring tools which work. And you need a good integration for test driven development. In those parts the Delphi IDE is far away from the state of the art. Using Net Beans, Eclipse or Visual Studio it's much easier to write robust and high quality code.
ReplyDeleteDelphi today is no longer the best choice for Windows applications. There are much better solutions. That's why I think it's deprecated. The Embarcadero management needs to change its mind completely if they want to get NEW users in ten years. The development since 2009 went to the wrong direction.
http://www.wired.com/2015/07/death-pc-not-greatly-exaggerated/ From the article, "mobile devices have become the dominant computing platform."
ReplyDeleteOxygene uses LLVM, Delphi does not.
ReplyDeleteOxygene and Delphi are now both going after the same shrinking pool of developers: the ones who have been using Delphi for 20 years and like our syntax. I know because I am in that pool. Almost nobody from the "outside" would choose either option if they didn't have the Delphi legacy. I suppose that is why RemObjects feels it necessary to talk down Delphi in its marketing: they know that they are going after the few people who care about Pascal syntax in non-Windows development (and who aren't already using FPC). The truth is that using Oxygene requires just as much "extra work" as using the native platform tools, and using Firemonkey leaves you at the mercy of Embarcadero's quality team and ability to keep up with the changes in the mobile platforms they support (in the case of Android, the subset of devices they can support). Neither are very attractive choices.
ReplyDeleteJosé RamÃrez 'Oxygene uses LLVM, Delphi does not.' - huh? It does for ARM (Android/iOS device), hence the rubbish compile times (which isn't to say the integration couldn't be better - I don't know).
ReplyDeleteFind the right tool for the task. Do the task.
ReplyDeleteMove on to next task.
Oxygene is a nice technology, but like Eli M said, FireMonkey is about getting things done when you want a good balance of performance, productivity and features. A lot of that page is outdated, inaccurate or irrelevant. I'm not going to debate the specific because it wouldn't improve the situation any.
ReplyDeleteThat page is a relic of the mindset that development tools are a religious war. The belief that it is a 0 sum game where developers only use one tool, ever. I remember when I used get wrapped up in those debates. It is still fun once in a while, but not productive.
There isn't one golden development tool that is the absolute best for all situations. So putting up a "this vs. that" page is really not very useful. It is like politics. If you just want to tell me why not to vote for someone else, all you've done is convinced me you are petty. Instead tell me what the tool is really good at, and maybe I will add it too my tool belt.
I like to get things done. Productivity is important.
Remobjects definitely hurts their business with their very public dislike for EMB. It makes me question their commitment to the Delphi platform and frankly is the reason I did not consider RO or data abstract. It's also off putting the way one of the partners uses profanity.
ReplyDelete