mORMot Open Source

ab

Administrator

From: France

Registered: 2010-06-21

Posts: 14,655

Website

Is marketing the new native?

In a very nice (like always) blog post, trolling comments were dispatched about the "native" concept:
- Firemonkey is Native UI;
- For RemObjects, .Net is the new native in Windows.

From the technical point of view, both assertions are false.

The article was subtitled: "Say a Lie Often Enough and You’ll Start Believing it Yourself".
At least, it is a trolling subject.

It remembered me about some of my past studies, i.e. five years of university studies in Medieval Theology in Italy and France (yes, I know, this is strange background for a Delphi programmer):
"Stat Roma pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus"

Our modern world is not thinking any more, it is sinking into nominalism, whereas IMHO the scientific approach is more compatible with a realistic approach of universals.
Today, marketing is everything.
Is it a necessary evil?

<b>Forum topic for http://blog.synopse.info/post/2012/05/2 … native</b>

ab

Administrator

From: France

Registered: 2010-06-21

Posts: 14,655

Website

Re: Is marketing the new native?

In a comment on the original blog article, I got an answer from RO's official:

Obviously, everyone is heartily invited to disagree with views portrayed by either myself or RemObjects Software, and with our philosophies and recommendations on software development practices. But i’d love to see some backing up of the claim that we are *lying* on our website. Please elaborate.

Here is my answer:

I'm no native English, so I apologize if the word is certainly too strong to your juridic background.

A) I was indeed at first confused by the http://www.remobjects.com/da/features.aspx page

But in all cases, the page this link comes from states:
" Different than every other data access technology available for Delphi, Data Abstract does not rely on dropping myriads of database-specific components onto your form to hold all your data access smarts; "

"EVERY" here is stated in bold.
And this is a false statement.
See all ORMs available in Delphi, some even over a Client-Server layer.
Of course, since I wrote some Open Source project featuring this (and more), without earning a cent on it, I was hurt by such a not fair statement.

From wikipedia:
To lie is to hold something which one knows is not the whole truth to be the whole truth, intentionally.
Since I'm pretty sure that you know about ORMs and remote access in Delphi, since the word "every" is bolded on purpose in the text and since it is an official web site, sounded like a lie to me. Or certainly a marketing emphasis (is it not a pleonasm?).

B) In the "official" page about "native" is
http://www.remobjects.com/products/native.aspx the purpose is more elaborated, and has a less trolling/confusing approach than in the initial blog entry.

I still do not understand how you can sustain that a WPF design is more "native" than any other UI on Windows. WPF is so expressive that you can do whatever button layout or application behavior you want to. The whole #1 argument is IMHO voided when you put WPF in terms of "native user experience".

The VCL itself was a big abstraction layer over the WinAPI - and a welcome one! Since Delphi XE2, it features skins. It is by no way "developer native" to the Win32/Win64 plartform.

So no lies in this case, of course, but marketing stuff for non technical people. Nice for the managers. But for programmers, at least confusing material for some people how wants facts and not blabla.
Sorry if my poor wording did hurt you.

I meant no offense here.
Just being fed up with wrong information, on technical subjects, just to sell huge license fee.
From my POV, $900 for features that mORMot excels with, is worth a thinking.
Especially if you wonder about scaling and server-side speed - see http://synopse.info/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=4138#p4138