A couple of weeks ago, we published the latest release of the DevExpress VCL Subscription, v20.2. Now that the Thanksgiving break is over, it's time to talk about what we plan for FireMonkey. I'm afraid that it's not the best of news: we have decided to put our FMX development on hold and not enhance the grid beta any further. There are several reasons for this decision.
1. After some three years of experimentation and development with FireMonkey, we have come to the conclusion that it is too slow for the depth of functionality and the type of controls for which we're recognized. Actually, this is something we've encountered before with C# and Xamarin Forms: we had to concede that the only way we could develop useful controls for that framework was to write them natively. In essence, we write them twice: once for iOS with Objective-C, and once for Android with Java, and then create a "simple" Xamarin Forms wrapper to expose their functionality to the C# developer. We found it was the only viable way we could produce the user experience and performance for our controls that our customers expect. Of course, as you can surmise, it’s over twice the usual work and effort to produce a useable control. With regard to our Delphi customer base, we and the team would rather concentrate on producing the best-in-class VCL controls – witness the newly released beta of the Gantt control as an example.
2. Another reason, perhaps less paramount, is that the FireMonkey framework, the API if you like, is still not extensive or detailed enough for the depth of functionality we and our customers assume from our 22 years of using and capitalizing on the VCL framework. We keep on running into functionality roadblocks that require us to write extensions to the base FMX library.
3. Finally, and I'd have to say this is a little disappointing, we just didn't get the level of interest or feedback from our customers that we were projecting. Perhaps this was due to the fact that the grid and editors beta we released wasn't extensive enough that people were ready to try it out and provide feedback on the functionality, or maybe there just isn't enough interest in FireMonkey for, say, MacOS, and hence our desktop viewpoint didn't match expectations. Again, this leads us to believe that our customer base would prefer more and better VCL controls rather than splitting the team into two to provide FMX controls as well.
The current beta of our FireMonkey grid suite will remain available as a free download for VCL Subscription customers from the Download Center. As of this point in time, we have no plans to add any further documentation or enhancements.
If you have feedback about this decision or wish to discuss it, do please email me at julianb@devexpress.com.