7 ms·

Oracle nabs Xamarin as a cloud partner

51 points by kryptiskt 11y ago

stdgy 11y ago
The most interesting thing about this doesn't seem to be their cloud support. It's the inclusion of Xamarin in Oracle sales pitches delivered by their well connected sales force to corporate clients. Seems like a smart way to ease yourself into the corporate world.
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago
  > Seems like a smart way to ease yourself into the corporate world. Not really easing though; the majority of sales for Xamarin is in the enterprise space.
  - pionar 11y ago
    Exactly, Xamarin's value proposition is enterprise and medium-large software vendors already on the .NET stack that don't want to have to learn Java and Obj-C and have two codebases.
  - stdgy 11y ago
    That's a good point. Though, if the enterprise I work in is representative (notwithstanding a singular anecdote not being data), the proportion of people that haven't heard of them is higher than those that have.
nissehulth 11y ago
I do like C# and I wanted to like Xamarin. But as someone who write mobile apps for fun, $600 per year for a dual-platform "indie" license is just too much. And I believe the pricing is also the reason the open source community around Xamarin is small. There are a few projects on github, but not much activity. I doubt any of this will improve with a Oracle partnership.
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago
  > I doubt any of this will improve with a Oracle partnership. Considering the partnership is around Oracle's cloud offering yeah the partnership isn't going to do anything for their licensing prices. Honestly I was hoping Microsoft would buy them and improve upon it. They already have some integration but it would be cool if they bundled in the licenses too. Then I'd imagine indie dev would be free.
  - nissehulth 11y ago
    Agree, Microsoft would be a much better option, at least from my point of view. I understand that Xamarin mostly target enterprise devs, but I believe their ecosystem would benefit from a more active community. I'm also sure Microsoft's mobile app store would benefit from it.
- pjmlp 11y ago
  On the other end you can choose to pay $350.00 per month for Qt, as they dropped their Indie license and still have to code lots of platform specific code, given how they are playing catchup on mobile OS. Me, I have decided to focus just on Android, as it is only for hobby coding and although I find WP great, its future is uncertain.
  - chc 11y ago
    Out of curiosity, what is wrong with Qt's open-source version?
    - ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
      Its C++ and not C#?
    - pjmlp 11y ago
      It cannot be used for commercial purposes. Which I think is faire anyway, given the amount of work they put into it. Not a problem if you never will sell your apps.
azakai 11y ago
> "If you look on Google Trends for Xamarin, it's the No. 1 mobile platform now in terms of mindshare." First of all, Google Trends isn't necessarily the best way to determine that. But second, it doesn't seem to be true? Unless "mobile platform" means something surprising? edit: Maybe it's just an inaccurate quote? This other quote and text also look puzzling: > "Every company today is building an average 30-40 mobile apps used by employees, customers, business partners," Friedman says. That stat comes from the company that uses his service 30-40 new apps for each company..? And which is the "company" referred to in the last sentence, as the source for that puzzling stat?
RexRollman 11y ago
Considering that Oracle's current efforts against Google could bring down the software industry as we know it, I wouldn't touch any product of Oracle's with a ten foot pole.
- hhandoko 11y ago
  I can't really avoid Oracle's product at this stage. Since they purchase Sun, Java is Oracle. I had wished Google stepped up the game during the Sun bidding wars... For the JVM ecosystem, I develop in Scala and plan to switch my JDK to Azul's [1] (soon, I hope). [1] - http://www.azulsystems.com/ http://www.azulsystems.com/
noobie 11y ago
How exactly does Xamarin compare to native development (Java/{Objective C, Swift})?
- sandyarmstrong 11y ago
  You write C# code that gets compiled down to native code. Xamarin provides C# bindings for the platform's APIs. You can, therefore, do anything in C# that you would do in the platform's normal language. This is appealing to those who prefer C#, and to those that want to share business logic between their iOS, Android, and WP apps, but want to write that logic in a higher-level language than C++. Disclaimer: I work for Xamarin. Just saw your question was unanswered and thought I'd explain the basics.
- titanix2 11y ago
  If you prefer C# over Java, well, it is better. Learning both a new platform and a new language (especially Objective-C in the days Swift didn't exists) is a daunting task and Xamarin can ease the pain here. Also it is great to be able to maintain a single code base for the data model layer (including persistance), network access etc. And you can also use platform specific native APIs in C#. The not-so-smooth part is the UI. You have two choices here: using the Xamarin Forms library which is a toolkit that maps high level UI component to natives ones, with the drawbacks of less customization. Or to use the native UI tool (XCode designer for iOS, Visual Studio for WP; Xamarin Studio comes with a designer for Android) to create it. But in this case, you can't use data binding, which makes WP(F) developper very sad :( As a hobbyist mobile student developer, I wouldn't have enough time to develop a multiplatform mobile apps without it. (note: they offer free Indie plan to student who ask for it).
  - m_fayer 11y ago
    You absolutely can still use databinding without using forms! Take a look at mvvmcross or reactiveui, both very powerful.
pinaceae 11y ago
ahh Oracle, the elephant's graveyard of software. "I'd like to buy a CRM system" - "No problem, which of the 6 we have accumulated over the years would you like? Siebel? CRMonDemand? Peoplesoft CRM? Fusion? ...."

51 points by kryptiskt 11y ago

stdgy 11y ago

The most interesting thing about this doesn't seem to be their cloud support. It's the inclusion of Xamarin in Oracle sales pitches delivered by their well connected sales force to corporate clients. Seems like a smart way to ease yourself into the corporate world.

BinaryIdiot 11y ago
> Seems like a smart way to ease yourself into the corporate world. Not really easing though; the majority of sales for Xamarin is in the enterprise space.
- pionar 11y ago
  Exactly, Xamarin's value proposition is enterprise and medium-large software vendors already on the .NET stack that don't want to have to learn Java and Obj-C and have two codebases.
- stdgy 11y ago
  That's a good point. Though, if the enterprise I work in is representative (notwithstanding a singular anecdote not being data), the proportion of people that haven't heard of them is higher than those that have.

nissehulth 11y ago

I do like C# and I wanted to like Xamarin. But as someone who write mobile apps for fun, $600 per year for a dual-platform "indie" license is just too much. And I believe the pricing is also the reason the open source community around Xamarin is small. There are a few projects on github, but not much activity. I doubt any of this will improve with a Oracle partnership.

BinaryIdiot 11y ago
> I doubt any of this will improve with a Oracle partnership. Considering the partnership is around Oracle's cloud offering yeah the partnership isn't going to do anything for their licensing prices. Honestly I was hoping Microsoft would buy them and improve upon it. They already have some integration but it would be cool if they bundled in the licenses too. Then I'd imagine indie dev would be free.
- nissehulth 11y ago
  Agree, Microsoft would be a much better option, at least from my point of view. I understand that Xamarin mostly target enterprise devs, but I believe their ecosystem would benefit from a more active community. I'm also sure Microsoft's mobile app store would benefit from it.
pjmlp 11y ago
On the other end you can choose to pay $350.00 per month for Qt, as they dropped their Indie license and still have to code lots of platform specific code, given how they are playing catchup on mobile OS. Me, I have decided to focus just on Android, as it is only for hobby coding and although I find WP great, its future is uncertain.
- chc 11y ago
  Out of curiosity, what is wrong with Qt's open-source version?
  - ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
    Its C++ and not C#?
  - pjmlp 11y ago
    It cannot be used for commercial purposes. Which I think is faire anyway, given the amount of work they put into it. Not a problem if you never will sell your apps.

azakai 11y ago

> "If you look on Google Trends for Xamarin, it's the No. 1 mobile platform now in terms of mindshare." First of all, Google Trends isn't necessarily the best way to determine that. But second, it doesn't seem to be true? Unless "mobile platform" means something surprising? edit: Maybe it's just an inaccurate quote? This other quote and text also look puzzling: > "Every company today is building an average 30-40 mobile apps used by employees, customers, business partners," Friedman says. That stat comes from the company that uses his service 30-40 new apps for each company..? And which is the "company" referred to in the last sentence, as the source for that puzzling stat?

RexRollman 11y ago

Considering that Oracle's current efforts against Google could bring down the software industry as we know it, I wouldn't touch any product of Oracle's with a ten foot pole.

hhandoko 11y ago
I can't really avoid Oracle's product at this stage. Since they purchase Sun, Java is Oracle. I had wished Google stepped up the game during the Sun bidding wars... For the JVM ecosystem, I develop in Scala and plan to switch my JDK to Azul's [1] (soon, I hope). [1] - http://www.azulsystems.com/ http://www.azulsystems.com/

noobie 11y ago

How exactly does Xamarin compare to native development (Java/{Objective C, Swift})?

sandyarmstrong 11y ago
You write C# code that gets compiled down to native code. Xamarin provides C# bindings for the platform's APIs. You can, therefore, do anything in C# that you would do in the platform's normal language. This is appealing to those who prefer C#, and to those that want to share business logic between their iOS, Android, and WP apps, but want to write that logic in a higher-level language than C++. Disclaimer: I work for Xamarin. Just saw your question was unanswered and thought I'd explain the basics.
titanix2 11y ago
If you prefer C# over Java, well, it is better. Learning both a new platform and a new language (especially Objective-C in the days Swift didn't exists) is a daunting task and Xamarin can ease the pain here. Also it is great to be able to maintain a single code base for the data model layer (including persistance), network access etc. And you can also use platform specific native APIs in C#. The not-so-smooth part is the UI. You have two choices here: using the Xamarin Forms library which is a toolkit that maps high level UI component to natives ones, with the drawbacks of less customization. Or to use the native UI tool (XCode designer for iOS, Visual Studio for WP; Xamarin Studio comes with a designer for Android) to create it. But in this case, you can't use data binding, which makes WP(F) developper very sad :( As a hobbyist mobile student developer, I wouldn't have enough time to develop a multiplatform mobile apps without it. (note: they offer free Indie plan to student who ask for it).
- m_fayer 11y ago
  You absolutely can still use databinding without using forms! Take a look at mvvmcross or reactiveui, both very powerful.

pinaceae 11y ago

ahh Oracle, the elephant's graveyard of software. "I'd like to buy a CRM system" - "No problem, which of the 6 we have accumulated over the years would you like? Siebel? CRMonDemand? Peoplesoft CRM? Fusion? ...."