Is Delphi Prism essentially a dead product?

I was over at the Embarcadero forums, and I noticed that, if you don’t count the “Forum announcements” by the Administrator, the number of forum posts for the year 2013 under “Prism” can be counted on one hand.

Then I checked in over at StackOverflow.com, I saw the number of Prism postings for all of 2013 can be counted on 3 hands.

Either this means that Prism is so easy to use and trouble-free that questions/issues never occur, OR else hardly anyone uses Prism.

Seeing how Oxygene and Prism are essentially one and the same product, is Oxygene used any more often than Prism?

Nothing could be further from the truth. Oxygene is alive and kicking, the product is being actively developed and extended, and its user base is continuously growing.

But some background, first: there’s really no distinction between what is Oxygene, and what is Prism, technically. “Prism” (and “Delphi Prism”) is just a brand name that Embarcadero uses in their distribution of the product — they license Oxygene for .NET from us, and ship it as part of RAD Studio , but it is not really a different or separate product.

As such, there’s really no distinction made whether people use “Prism” or “Oxygene”. They really all use Oxygene, since Prism is just a sticker that was pasted onto the box, so to speak.

Unfortunately, Embarcadero has not really been doing a stellar job in maintaining or promoting their Prism brand (or, indeed, the product itself). That’s why there’s very thin info on Prism on their website, and why the “prism” newsgroups they operate are pretty much a dead space, as well.

All real support, direct or peer-to-peer, for Oxygene is really happening here on our side. be it on these forums (the Beta forums are a lot more active than the public one, too, because most community-active/vocal users are on the bleeding edge and using the newer betas ;), or via our email support.

Another contributing factor in Prism or Oxygene not showing up that much in online forums such as Stack Overflow is that by they nature of how Oxygene works (it’s “just” a language/compiler, using the regular native frameworks), most of the questions and support issues users will face are not directly specific to Oxygene, so both when searching for answers, and when posting questions, Oxygene users won often care about the answers being specific to Oxygene.

As an example, if you want to find out how to do feature X in, say, Delphi, chances are you 're gonne go google for “X Delphi”, or post a question “How do i do X in Delphi”?

In Oxygene, you’d be using the native underlying platform, such as .NET, the Java/Android SDK, or the Cocoa frameworks on Mac/iOS. So if you have a question about how to do “Y”, you’re most likely gonna post “How do i solve Y on .NET”. You don’t need to limit your prospective helpers to those people who also use Oxygene — any answer that solves your problem in, say, C#, will do.

That skewed statistics for Oxygene use in public queries and discussions way down.

That said, Stack Overflow has 208 questions tagged with the (outdated) “delphi-prism” tag. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/delphi-prism, for example. (ideally, that tag should really be merged/renamed to “oxygene”). The “prism” tag unfortunately is taken by something else (unfortunate choice of brand names there, as Microsoft also has a WPF based technology they call Prism).

THAT said, of course Oxygene is used by a lot fewer people than, say, C#. But that’s not really a huge problem, because Oxygene shares the entire third party eco-system with C#, Java and Objective-C. So unlike with (say) Delphi, an Oxygene developer is not stuck in their own little bubble and dependent on tools, third party components and open source projects being available in Oxygene. As an Oxygene developer, you’re a first class citizen of the vast .NET community, of the full Android developer community, or the entire Cocoa/Objective-C developer community.

I hope this answers your question.

Oxygene is going strong, and getting better very day. Right now, we’re hard at work finishing off our “Oxygene for Cocoa” support, which will add truly native Mac and iOS support to the mix — among many other things we have planned for 2013 and beyond.

Thank you for your reply.

Also, I think there was a post over on Embarcadero Prism site that actually said it was better to post over here for support. And it is… But that leaves the Embarcadero site looking like no one uses Prism unfortunately.

i’ll try and get Embarcadero to just close those newsgroups completely.