

Oracle nabs Xamarin as a cloud partner - kryptiskt
http://uk.businessinsider.com/oracle-nabs-xamarin-as-a-cloud-partner-2015-7?r=US

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nissehulth
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.

~~~
mb_72
Comments like this have been made on the Xamarin forums a number of time -
that it's too expensive for 'hobby' developers. I'll make the same comment
here as I made there, that as a Xamarin Mac (Indie) developer I'm happy they
are NOT aiming their product at hobby / fun developers. A hobby is something
you do optionally, if you have the funds or time. If you can't afford it, or
can't monetise it - which I think is still an option for 'hobby' developers -
then you can't do it. It's the same if the hobby is skydiving, parachuting
etc.

As regards lack of open source material, it's not important to me however as
Xamarin is C# based then any OS project that utilises C# potentially can be
used within the Xamarin ecosystem.

There is a significant 'use-case' outside of the Hacker News / open source
community that Xamarin addresses. Just because it doesn't fall within the
parameters set down by (I am guessing) the majority of posters here, it
doesn't mean that it isn't a good or useful product.

~~~
ghuntley
Application for Open Source Project Subscription \-
[http://resources.xamarin.com/open-source-
contributor.html](http://resources.xamarin.com/open-source-contributor.html)

~~~
hhandoko
Nice! I didn't know this.

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azakai
> "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?

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RexRollman
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
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/)

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stdgy
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.

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BinaryIdiot
> 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.

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pionar
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.

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

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titanix2
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
You absolutely can still use databinding without using forms! Take a look at
mvvmcross or reactiveui, both very powerful.

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pinaceae
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? ...."

