[Mono-osx] Delphi Prism and all those Cocoa bridges

[marc hoffman]

Andrew,

> If I count correctly we have three (3) different Cocoa bridges in  
> Mono now.
>
> One is Cocoa#, which is part of Mono and rather incomplete (or so it  
> seemed
> to me).
>
> Another is  http://www.monobjc.net/ MonoObjc , which I found very  
> useful but
> it isn't part of Mono.
>
> A third one is  http://code.google.com/p/mobjc/ mobjc , which I  
> don't know
> much about. Plus I found it too complicated.
>
> Delphi Prism  http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/39017 supports the  
> creation
> of Cocoa applications  using Cocoa#.

we're also supporting Monobjc, as well. The IDE support is there in  
the November release, but we don't ship a template yet because this  
stuff got done too shortly before RTM for us to support it officially  
(but that was three months ago, and it has proven solid).

You can download a template for a Monobjc ap at http://remobjects.com/prismextras

Matter of fact, we're moving towards recommending Monobjc as the  
"recommended" way to do Cocoa apps in Prism (i know, the mobjc and  
NSWhatever guys will come in to complain that thier stuff is  
better ;-). When i spoke to Geoff at PDC he also recommended Monobjc  
as the most complete and best solution to work with.

> The most inconvenient part about writing Cocoa applications using  
> Mono is
> the build process, I think. Visual Studio doesn't support building  
> such
> applications, and neither do Xcode or MonoDevelop. But Visual Studio  
> does
> with Delphi Prism (which I haven't tried but have heard good things  
> about).
>
> Can something be done about this on Novell's side?

> Would it be remotely
> possible to unite the three different projects under one banner and  
> make
> them part of Mono?

i'd love to see this happen and have all the different fronts that  
people are working n for Obj-C/Mono bridging to be united. Mono/OS X  
development is a tiny niche of Mono usage in general, as it stands now  
(as much as i'd love that to change), so having four different teams/ 
people going off in different directions to further split this up,  
rather than working towards a common goal of having one "standard" way  
to build Cocoa apps in Mono (and one that could then be "four times  
better" than what we have now!) seems silly, at the least, and  waste  
of everyone's time, at worst.

> And what about official support in MonoDevelop or some
> module for Xcode?
>
> I'd pay a few hundred euros for a solution. Maybe a few others want  
> to join
> and we could offer a bounty?

i/we'd definitely be willing to contribute a bounty to any of the  
following:

- getting the bridges unified and moved forward
- getting managed compilers into Xcode (esp if done in a language  
agnostic way so that the same work could be leveraged for Prism, next  
to C#)
- getting MonoDevelop out from under the GPL (coz the second it is, we  
can ship full Prism support for it).


Yours,

marc hoffman

RemObjects Software
The Infrastructure Company
http://www.remobjects.com