The new Oxygene website (Oh, and some exciting new Oxygene announcements, too)

Yesterday, we launched the major revamp of our “Oxygene” product homepage, available at remobjects.com/oxygene, along with announcing the 5.2 release, a significant update to the product.

Let’s have a quick tour of the new content.

What’s New in 5.2

First, and most importantly, there’s the updated What’s New page, updated to list the new features in 5.2 and providing back access to previous release notes as well.

5.2 introduces some significant (and dare i say ground-breaking) improvements to error handling, with better fix-it support, auto-fix-its for select (safe to fix) issues and — my personal favorite – the new Treat Fixable Errors as Warnings, which can be an enormous timesaver if you just wanna code and test some quick changes. Of course there’s much more to 5.2 — such as our new IDE-integrated Gendarme Code Analysis, support for language-native tuples, Visual Studio 2012, Metro, and more.

Nougat

Next to 5.2, the second biggest announcement has been the first peek at “Nougat“. Nougat is the codename for a new (third) platform for Oxygene, namely Cocoa and the Objective-C runtime for creating truly native Mac and iOS apps. Right now it is just a teaser — we’ll be releasing more details about “Nougat” here on the blogs over the next few weeks.

The good news is that “Nougat” is already part of our new Oxygene shop SKU — so anyone buying (or renewing) Oxygene now will be among the first people to see the Nougat beta (roughly within the next month) and get the final product when it ships in 2013.

We’re very excited.

The Language

The new website also contains a sizable new section focusing on the Oxygene Language and its Object Pascal heritage. We have five pages detailing the most exciting language features. We also have an overview of Oxygene evolved over the years (even i rediscovered cool features i had forgotten about, as i wrote this page ;), and Jim has written an excellent history of the Pascal Language since the 1960s, including a cool diagram that shows how it all fits together:

The Platforms

Finally, there’s a new section that looks at Oxygene from the perspective of target platforms. With the introduction of Nougat, Oxygene now literally covers every single major target platform that matters today — from desktop and mobile to the server. The Platforms page serves as a central point to discover all the possibilities Oxygene opens up, and for most platforms, links to a dedicated “platform hub” page with details, links and videos about using Oxygene for the platform.

Jim has also created an excellent new WPF Development with Oxygene video to go along with the “Windows Desktop” platform, which, oddly, was underrepresented in the video department.

We expect this section to grow and expand over time, with more potential targets added, and the information for each target getting more comprehensive.

One More Thing: Sugar

Hidden away on the page about the three supported core Frameworks, you’ll find another sneak peek at something we are working on: an open source cross-platform base library for Oxygene, built on the awesome Mapped Types feature introduced in Oxygene 5.1.

Having a cross-platform language such as Oxygene is great, and one of Oxygene’s strong points is that it targets the platform-native APIs on each platform. The downside is that even the base types — simple stuff such as Strings or Dictionaries — can vary widely between platforms, making it tough to share code of any reasonable complexity.

The goal of “Sugar”, which is the codename of this project, is to create a toll-free mapping library that will allow Oxygene developers to write common code that will compile for all three platforms and work with the platform’s base types using a shared API.

This is even cooler than it sounds ;)

The Shop

Before we forget: of course the new Oxygene 5.2 is available now at $499 for new users — that includes all three platforms. Users coming from Prism XE2 (or our own Oxygene for Java) can renew for $349 — which also includes all three platforms.

We also have cross-grade pricing for users of Delphi. If you currently use Delphi, you can cross-grade to the full Oxygene package (again, you guessed it, all three platforms) for $399.

Let us know what you think!

Over the past month or so, we have put a lot of work into the new website. Let us know what you think, like, dislike, or are missing.

Of course even more work and sweat has gone into Oxygene 5.2 (in my humble opinion our most solid release yet, and i am very proud of what the team has delivered), and work already continues to go into the upcoming September and October interim releases, and towards “Nougat”

If you haven’t yet, try Oxygene — we have a free 30-day trial version for the .NET and Java editions. We hope you like what you see, and please do let us know what you think!

yours,
marc