Oracle nabs Xamarin as a cloud partner | Hacker News Reader

Oracle nabs Xamarin as a cloud partner

uk.businessinsider.com

51 pointskryptiskt26 comments

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Out of curiosity, what is wrong with Qt's open-source version?

Its C++ and not C#?

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.

That's not true. The open source version of Qt is under the LGPL.

So if you dynamically link, then you can probably do your usual proprietary stuff. (Albeit dynamically linking C++ exposes you to a whole bunch of ABI fragility depending on your platform and compiler chain.)

If you statically link, they you have to make your source code available, which still could be acceptable for some commercial companies.

Many of the mobile components are under commercial license, like payments, QML native compiler (you really need it), charts,...

Personally, I wouldn't be doing those from scratch just to avoid paying.

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.

Application for Open Source Project Subscription - http://resources.xamarin.com/open-source-contributor.html

Nice! I didn't know this.

One thing to take into account is that the more people who use your product, the more likely they'll push it where someone else can foot the bill. If someone learns Java or ObjC/Swift, because they can't afford to use Xamarin that means that individual will be less likely to recommend it at companies they work at. If it followed more of a Unity model it could cause a cycle where people start pushing out more things to support Xamarin, which causes more people to pick it up, which causes more people to recommend its use. It is why so many startups focus on user acquisition to create this gigantic tipping point.

Xamarin offers a free starter edition[1] and you can request free full licenses for use with Open Source projects[2].

Getting started on your own project or doing an Open Source project that relies on Xamarin's tools is perfectly possible. In fact we use such free licenses to produce OS X and iOS versions of the Tomboy note taking app[3].

[1] https://store.xamarin.com [2] http://resources.xamarin.com/open-source-contributor.html [3] https://github.com/tomboy-notes

> "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?

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.

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/

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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).

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

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? ...."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com