> {quote:title=Joanna Carter wrote:}{quote}
> Phil Hess a __crit :
>
> > Part of me hopes that we don't get what we're wishing for, meaning a
> > cross-platform VCL. The new group of mobile developers won't care
> > about VCL and might even reject a tool that makes them use VCL. They
> > want to use the UIAccelerometer class, not some wrapper surrogate.
>
> FMPOV, even if X-VCL gives us UI wrappers for controls, what would
> happen to the concept of Cocoa bindings? Using Interface Builder to
> specify bindings is really simple and so powerful, compared with having
> to write code to connect up ontrols to properties of objects manually.
>
> Joanna
>
Right, Cocoa rules. But with Delphi X we don't even know yet what kind of interface to Cocoa it will have. Will it be via some third party product like Qt? Or a bridge? Or extensions to the language itself (like what they did years ago to fit better with Windows)?
The Free Pascal boys have taken the radical step of creating a new Objective Pascal dialect to support ObjC (and thus Cocoa classes).
http://wiki.freepascal.org/FPC_PasCocoa
This is going all the way, with few compromises. And it allows a parser to generate the ObjP classes from the ObjC header files all in one swoop. The result is a single unit, CocoaAll, that has all the Cocoa classes. A similar parser does the same thing for the iPhone UI classes, producing the iPhoneAll unit.
Look at the NoNib .zip file here for a simple app that uses the CocoaAll unit. As a proof of concept it does not use any .nib files, but of course they can also be used:
http://web.fastermac.net/~MacPgmr/Lazarus/
A little readme.txt file is included if you're interested in compiling this yourself.
Note that this app uses only two units: CocoaAll and SysUtils. Yet it's a full-fledged Cocoa app.
The question is how radical a step Codegear is going to take with Delphi X.
Thanks.
-Phil