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

[Andrew Brehm]

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 2:31 PM, marc hoffman <mh at elitedev.com> wrote:
>
> 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).

Very good.

I find Delphi more convincing every time I read about it! Ever since
the .NET Rocks podcast episode about Prism I was sort of hooked.

http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=409

But you know the episode, you were in it! :-)

(Wie geht's so in Berlin?)


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

I'll have a look!

> 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.

I think we are getting somewhere.

I am looking for a way to write applications that are portable between
Windows and Mac OS X, ideally use Cocoa, and are garbage-collected.

I have been using REALbasic for years, and am thinking about learning
Python. I don't like Java and Java doesn't use Cocoa. I use Visual
Studio at work.


>>
>> 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),

I am sure it will change. I think there is a positively huge market
for decent cross-platform applications.


> 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.

Yes.

And in the mean time REALbasic still doesn't support Cocoa and QT
would force me to learn C++.


>> 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).

I'd be content with a Visual Studio plug-in that supports Mono and
Monobjc. But I am willing to spend money and learn Delphi if this is
the best way for me to get what I want. I liked Turbo Pascal.

(I am a build engineer, not a programmer. All of this is about my
hobby projects. That's why I am looking for easy-to-use solutions.)