Delphi vs Xamarin

Recently I have been doing some mobile development and assessing the pros and cons of Delphi and Xamarin. Here is a brief list of them, there will be more as I use both.

Delphi Pros

• Use existing familiar IDE.
• Quick to prototype and deploy to Android device.
• Easy to use interface designer.
• Large shared code base between different platforms.

Delphi Cons

• Expensive to purchase the latest version of Delphi.
• Crashes often with the loss of any recent changes.
• Slow to build and deploy.
• File size is big, 'Hello world' app will be at least 25MB.

Xamarin Pros

• Nice to use interface (C# code).
• Easy and quick to deploy app to Android.
• File size small, suspect this is due to it having to also deploy virtual platform.
• The app is quick to run on the device compared with Delphi app.
• Cheap compared with Delphi.

Xamarin Cons

• Less shared code between platforms.
• Interface designer does not feel as flexible.
• Properties inspector needs improving and is not as user friendly as Delphi.
• Online tutorials and help are not concise and some seem out of date.

I should point out the version of Delphi I used was XE5, the current release is XE7 so they might have fix a few bugs. I did go to a XE7 launch event (which I will write another blog entry about) and from what I saw and the questions I asked it is not much different and they have not done anything to improve the build time. When it comes to the speed of the build for Android it is best to build to the device rather than use the Android simulator which for both is very slow.

I will continue to add to this blog entry with other pros and cons as I come across them.

Delphi XE5 - The quickest way C# developers can produce Apps

With Delphi XE5, a software developer can produce apps for both iOS and Android from the same code base. But which developers will want to do this?

If you are an iOS developer, it is most likely you are comfortable just developing app for Apple devices and that the company you work for employs Android developers for the Android version and vis versa. And you have no need or want to learn a new language to get the same results.

However, if you are a C# developer then Delphi XE5 might be the quickest way to develop Apps. I found moving from Delphi to C# very easy and after 1 day was developing C# web services. I also found it easy switching back to Delphi after using C# for some months.

So if you are a .Net developer then I would recommend you at least have a look at Delphi XE5.