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

Wed Mar 4 18:18:30 EST 2009

Weird, sent that email ages ago...  Anyhow, there is no Prism IDE.  Prism uses Visual Studio as it's IDE.   You don't have to own Visual Studio first, though, because if you don't have it Prism ships with the Visual Studio shell.  Since I use Visual Studio Pro it just shows up as another language to start a project with in my list.  

I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about Prism.  I'm not sure what anyone is reading but what is now called Prism started out as RemObjects "Chrome".  RemObjects felt that Borland was going the wrong direction in their .NET strategy and chose to do it the way they felt was correct which was to build an Object Pascal compiler and integrate thoroughly with Visual Studio so you could get all the benefits of what's available in that environment.  I bought v1.5, so obviously I decided they went the right direction and Borland went the wrong direction early on.  There was a name change last year from Chrome to Oxygene, presumably because Google wanted the name Chrome for their browser.  Then, late last year, CodeGear under Embarcadaro (they were sold from Borland in the interim) decided to drop their Delphi.NET product and license Oxygene and branded that product "Delphi Prism".   But Oxygene would is as native to Visual Studio as C# and Visual
 Basic.NET are and can be used in the same way.  Hope that helps.

Thank you,
Ron

________________________________
From: Duane Wandless <duane at wandless.net>
To: Ron Grove <ron_grove at yahoo.com>
Cc: mono-osx at lists.ximian.com
Sent: Wednesday, March 4, 2009 1:49:24 PM
Subject: Re: [Mono-osx] Delphi Prism and all those Cocoa bridges

Ron - I agree with much of what you typed, especially regarding tools being agnostic towards languages.  And I do not want to debate languages... though I do believe
in critical mass.  The more developers using a given language or tool
will tip the viability of that language or tool.

I guess this article needs more analysis.  The end goal is to develop
.NET applications that are more integrated with Interface Builder.  I
really do not care if I have IB/Obj-C or IB/ObjectPascal UI code as
long as I can have C# code and the IB integration.
http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/39017

As long as Delphi Prism is agnostic and allows me to use C# from within their IDE all is good.  But if Delphi Prism is not agnostic then we are back to the question, how is the non-agnostic tool relevant?  This is essentially the question I have not seen answered, and also one I have not tried to answer for myself by trying Prism.  It is unclear from the Prism material if C# can be side-by-side coded from within the Prism IDE.  I'm guessing not unless you have VS Pro, though that is still unclear.

Time permitting I will try Delphi Prism one of these days.

Duane

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 1:32 PM, Ron Grove <ron_grove at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I may be missing something but I do not see the advantage of Delphi Prism
> (which may just be a personal preference ).  Yes the CLR can
> be utilized through various languages.

Probably is personal preference.  Mine is for Pascal.

>  But the one language that is
> relevant (at least to me) is C#.  Not Pascal, C++ or VB.  Yes the syntax of
> object pascal may be similar and yes it may have additional features not
> found in C#.  But it is not C#.  I do not want to learn yet another
> language.

The one language that is relevant (at least to me) is Pascal.  Not C#, C++, VB.  Yes, the syntax of C# is similar to Delphi's Object Pascal because the same man was a major part of the design process, but it is not Pascal, etc.

What's the point of bringing these religious language debates into this process anyhow?  We all have our biases and I'm sure everyone here knows this road leads nowhere.  RemObjects is a commercial organization who has committed time and resources to see success on the OS X platform.  Their commercial customers (like me) are also going to want to see them succeed.  So going down this path won't just cause language tensions but could also cause customers who are prone to overreaction when their financial interests are at stake (again, like me) to overreact and create a cycle of tension where there doesn't need to be any.  marc has even offered bounties to get things going the right direction.  I think this deserves a modicum of respect at least not to put down Oxygene.

> The "solution" I'm looking for is a native Mac IDE that integrates nicely
> with Interface Builder where the language is C#, utilizing one of the
> bridges, Monobjc, mobjc, etc.  My current environment is virtual Win7 Visual
> Studio, mobjc, and Interface Builder.

And I see no point in any development tool that doesn't respect the language agnostic goals of the CLR.  I personally prefer to see the GPL finally removed from MonoDevelop and IB integration plug-ins designed for use in it in a language agnostic manner so I can use the language of my choice, just like I can on Windows.  This would also provide opportunities for commercial organizations like RemObjects can provide innovative new solutions to their customers.  Seriously, why should I live with C# only restrictions with Mono tools when I don't have to on Windows.  Makes no sense to me.

>
> Thanks everyone for the ongoing discussions and opinions... I try to keep an
> open mind.

I do to, until my beloved Pascal is given short shrift...  I would just like to reiterate my belief that language agnosticism is a worthy goal in the CLR and IMO should be encouraged by the tools given the most focus by the community.

Thank you,
Ron

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