Having lost our Delphi reseller in NZ last year, and with the Kiwi dollar riding high against the US dollar, now is a good time to make purchases from online stores operating in US currency. RemObjects has such a store and they also have a cross-grade offer for Delphi customers wishing to move over to the Oxygene product.
RemObjects cross-grade deal for Oxygene, including support for .NET, Android, iOS, Linux (via mono) is priced at just US$399.
At current exchange rates, that’s a little over NZ$450 which is excellent value for money compared to the prices that Embarcadero are gouging charging for the XE4 “upgrade”, especially when you add in the cost of the additional “mobile add on”.
This is even more impressive when you appreciate that for significantly less than the price Embarcadero are charging for what is (despite their specious marketing claims) a hybrid iOS product (native code, non-native UI), in Oxygene you get a genuinely “true native” solution not only for iOS and OS X but also Android (and of course ,NET).
That is, native code and native UI, and “first-class”, native access to each respective platform API’s.
They don’t even mind if you want or need to do client/server development and won’t charge you more for the privilege. How incredible is that ? 😉
UPDATE: In fact, as others have already pointed out, now is a good time to cross-grade for any/all Delphi users in a lot of respects, not just those of us in NZ.
Tomorrow I set off with my fiancée on a 5 week holiday, first visiting her home country of Ukraine, before showing off my favourite parts of the UK to her (my first return visit since emigrating to NZ almost 8 years ago!). Upon my return I hope and expect to be renewed and refreshed, and intend throwing myself into some projects with Oxygene with concomitantly revitalised vigour.
Why not just use Lazarus?
I looked at FPC and Lazarus again last year when it went 1.0, but quickly ran into problems as I had adopted a “dotted unit name” convention back in the days of Delphi 7 which now permeates my projects and is (or was) not well supported by FPC or Lazarus at that time. I believe there was or now is a solution to that in place, so I may yet revisit it.
But in the meantime, I am excited by Oxygene and so have “voted with my wallet”.
I can “vote” Lazarus/FPC any time with only some expenditure of time, but the exchange rate for that remains pretty constant so there’s no advantage in exercising that option at any one particular time over another. 🙂
I never used that, so for me moving to Lazarus was pretty easy.
How big of a deal would it be to simply use the standard unit naming convention? We are simply talking about the unit names in uses section right? The nice thing about Lazarus is it is super compatible with VCL and even has a Delphi mode, though the FPC mode has some advantages, so I tend not to use the Delphi Mode. I could not be more pleased with Lazarus and FreePascal. You should for sure check it out again, and they even fix bugs, unlike borcadero……
A pretty big deal. I have hundreds of units with dotted names now.
I totally agree–in fact, it’s a good time for ANY Delphi user to cross-grade. I made my jump yesterday. What’s more is that they already have the Java/Android support–no waiting for that, or paying EVEN MORE when the next “low-cost” upgrade smacks those staying in the Delphi ecosystem.
Some people complain that they’ll have to learn device-specific designers, but in my opinion, that’s better in the long run because not only will you be ready to use other tools should the need arise, but I imagine it will produce better apps when using native APIs and controls rather than “pixel-perfect” representations of them.
Indeed. “Pixel-perfect” is all well and good, but “poor-performance” seems, unsurprisingly, to be the “price-paid”. 🙂
I made the jump on Monday. Still trying to find the time to jump in. So far, RemObjects and Marc Hoffman have been a breath of fresh air following the letdown of Embarcadero.
They have .Net. They have Android. They’ll have iOS and OS X within months (you get the beta with your purchase).
They have a 30-day trial, folks! Download Oxygene and give it a whirl. You’ll really appreciate what they have done and the $399 cross-grade is a steal!
Too bad RemObjects don’t support Win32/64… that would be a no brainer!! 🙂
You need runtime code for Win32/64. And a VCL or similar to. RemObjects do not have and dont need because they use .Net and Android runtimes.
Well, looks like I’m the only one here who is disappointed by Oxygene.
I wish I could return it for a refund.
It’s Visual Studio integration has a lot of quirks, for example, right now my Intellisense stopped working, but there is other stuff too.
The documentation is bad, you cannot buy a book about it and the community is very small.
To me it looks like it’s better to stick with the free tools from the platform providers.
I had to read that twice to make sure you weren’t levelling those complaints against Delphi, because they seem awfully familiar. 😉
how shall this work:
” “true native” solution not only for iOS and OS X but also Android (and of course ,NET).”
“native” with .Net, this is a contradiction within itself.
Is this really what you wanna say?
No. “true native” solution for iOS, OS X and Android.
And in addition, .NET. But the “true native” part was only intended to apply to iOS, OS X and Android. Sorry for the confusion, although unlike Embarcadero, RemObjects are actually very clear about what they offer so any misunderstanding taken from what I might have clumsily said would soon have been cleared up in the actual product materials. 🙂
Lazarus has full native win32/64 support as well as support for Linux using QT or GTK2 as well as Mac. And they are working on IOS and Android support. It’s a win win, and the more people that use it the better it will be, so check it out. The desktop development is pretty darn good and the IDE is also excellent and has some things not even delphi has.
Enjoy the Ukraine Jolyon. Summer looks to be finally creeping over on the horizon here in the UK, but the economic climate remains chilly…
Even more reason to vote with our quantitatively eased sterling and jump to Oxygene. We’re in the process of selecting a reasonable combination of licenses – and may well end up buying a couple of suite licenses for 2 platforms.
No more cash flowing to Embarcadero from us is the likely outcome – XE2 and no further.
Thanks Peter, though it’s not “the Ukraine”, just “Ukraine”. 🙂
It’s a common mistake stemming – it’s thought by some – from the fact that “Ukraine” in Russian sounds very similar to the Russian word окраин (pronounced “okrain”), meaning something akin to “borderlands” or “rural suburbs” etc, and at various times Ukraine – or parts of it – has been little more than a region of a larger Russia (in very simplistic terms, as I understand it).
Hence not “Ukraine” (recognising it as a legitimate entity in it’s own right) but the rather more condescending “the ukraine” (that rural bit on the edge of Russia).
Ukrainian-Russian relations are something of a sensitive area. 🙂
Wow, that’s one heck of an off-topic digression! LOL
Since we have digressed into language matters, did you notice that your revealed sexual preferences changed mid-line, between “fiancé” and “she”, in your main posting? I suggest a correction to “fiancée” to spare your readers these mental gymnastics.
Not “revealed” but perhaps “obscured”, or more likely “confused” since the sentence in question contained an apparent contradiction.
But only in French is fiancé masculine. English doesn’t have such strict formal gender and the word fiancé is equally applicable to male and female, although usually without the acute. The relationship between French and English in the area of language is a whole other complex and controversial topic. 🙂
I do usually try to respect the French origins of the word however, but spelling correction doesn’t pick that sort of mistake up. Thanks for pointing it out. 🙂
Lest anyone reading this blog gets the wrong idea…
There is no native Oxygene. According to their site, they have a version for Java that produces .jar files. Java is not native. They have a version for .Net. .Net is not native. They are working on a cocoa version. It is not ready yet. There is no native Win32/64 version. This is what their website says.
If you read the RemObjects site carefully, you will see that they say that you can access native code with Oxygene, not that your Oxygene project is running as native code itself. This is like the difference between a Delphi executable, and using a .Net app to access native code via PInvoke and interop.
As far as I can tell, there are only two ways to create true native iOS apps: Objective C/xCode and Delphi XE4 with Mobile. Tools like Xamarin and Oxygene are using Mono to get .Net useable on iOS. That is NOT native.
I do not know where you think you are reading that information about Oxygene for iOS. From what you describe it sounds like you have found some old information about using Mono to target OS X. But in Nougat, Oxygene emits LLVM code, just as the XE4 compiler does. That side of things is the same between both XE4 and Oxygene.
But Oxygene has extended it’s language into the Objective-C runtime to make it a “first class” Cocoa citizen in the same way that the original Oxygene is a first class .NET citizen and Cooper a first-class Java citizen. XE4 code on the other hand exists in it’s own little world, somewhat detached from the runtime of the platform it is running in, and requiring clumsy bridging and wrapping to gain access to the platform runtime.
It was arguably the same even with the VCL and Win32, but it didn’t matter so much then because Win32 was so primitive that the VCL was almost a necessary improvement, akin to MFC. But Java and Cocoa are worlds apart from Win32. The world has moved on. Delphi unfortunately has not kept up.
“I do not know where you think you are reading that information about Oxygene”
remobjects.com
erm… Paul, not Peter and you’ve read way too much in to my use of “enjoy the Ukraine”. You’ll note I also said “here in the UK”. For the record, I know neither are “the”. Anyway, I see you’re fiancé has given you a good cultural background for your trip!
Oops, sorry Paul. That’s what happens when you respond to comments in a hurry when you should be helping with packing. 🙂
“the” is appropriate for the UK because without it the “United” adjective in the name would sound odd. 🙂 The United Kingdom. As per the United States (of America), the United Arab Emirates or, a few years ago, the Soviet Union etc. But you wouldn’t say “the Wales” or “the France” or even “the New Zealand”. 🙂
I think we all spend too much time using strongly typed languages. Here’s to the semantic nuances of English!
Indeed. My favorite game with English is to ask people how to pronounce ‘ghoti’ using ‘English pronunciation’. An exercise in demonstrating that – among other things – it isn’t a phonetic language. 🙂
As an Android-over-Apple kind of guy (not trying to debate, just pointing out my position) Oygene currently has more to offer me for current and future client projects (as well one current and many future personal projects).
Hell, I only have one Delphi client left, and I can see that fizzling out shortly!