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I miss Delphi

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81–90 of 194 posts

Re: I miss Delphi

#81

You have major open source libraries like GTK, wxWidgets, Qt. Also .NET, Java which offer multiple ways of doing forms that are tied to the target platform. In addition, RealBasic (now Xojo) and... Delphi. After Borland, other companies continued working with Delphi, namely, Embarcadero: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi Now, the prices can be a bit prohibitive. I would try one of the open source ones.

we have GTK, QT, etc. yet we still insist on creating web apps with javascript and CSS

Re: I miss Delphi

#82
post #25

If anyone using Delphi to build big apps in early 90s was told that to do the same function in 25 years time they would need HTML, CSS, JS, Ruby or PHP or similar, some SQL, some Rust or Go and probably a few DSLs - it would take months longer to build - require multiple servers - and would need more test code than app code to get it 98% as stable - you wouldn't have believed a word of it. Every single time I have to…

You're still using Rust / Go ? I've been using Luna on the Rocket stack, with Huston for distribution and Apollo for stack management, and it fixes mostly all the problems you've mentioned.

I use emacs+org mode, and it fixes all those problems even better

Re: I miss Delphi

#83
Back in 98/99 I wrote an app on Delphi for my dad to run his business. He is still using it today (on a modern OS) although he reports bugs that I no longer can fix.

Re: I miss Delphi

#84

I'd love to hear what you think of Anvil ( https://anvil.works ) - it sounds like exactly what you're asking for. It's a very Delphi-like (or VB-like) tool for building web apps: Drag and drop for visual layout, then write code with a simple object model behind it. (It's 2017, so Python rather than Pascal - but more similar than it is different. Also built-in git repo, a built-in database, code completion, integratio…

I just tried the demo "MyCorp" anvil app: https://secure-portal.anvilapp.net/

It definitely feels bloated -- slow loading, tons of JS, overly engineered. Perhaps the demo should do something more substantial.

Re: I miss Delphi

#85

While I don't necessarily want a Delphi-like thing for Web development, I do want a Delphi-like thing for developing GUI desktop applications. So far I've tried out a few things, but for some reason they don't "feel" the same as Delphi did. Maybe it's because I'm older and have moved on to different tools, or maybe it's because I haven't made the time to properly invest in these. Anyways, here's what I've played with…

Have you tried Xojo (used to be called REALbasic)? It's the closest I've found to Delphi, especially in that it builds & deploys really easily (eg no Java runtime required, feels native, never feel like I'm fighting with the compiler and my tool-chain).

I haven't played enough with Lazarus to see how they compare though, it looked promising too.

Re: I miss Delphi

#87

I did professional development in Delphi for 13 years, writing and maintaining a sprawling 700k line reservation system. I don't miss it much. It was a great learning experience to have to fill in all the gaps in the standard libraries by twisting and turning Pascals rigid rules into something semi-useful; writing foreign function interfaces to WinSock to get around the limitations in the provided toy socket implemen…

What language did you move to?

Re: I miss Delphi

#88

While I don't necessarily want a Delphi-like thing for Web development, I do want a Delphi-like thing for developing GUI desktop applications. So far I've tried out a few things, but for some reason they don't "feel" the same as Delphi did. Maybe it's because I'm older and have moved on to different tools, or maybe it's because I haven't made the time to properly invest in these. Anyways, here's what I've played with…

Did you try Qt? Creating GUI with qtdesigner is similar to Delphi, and Qt Studio is well integrated nowadays.

I think the primary downside people find with QT is the language support. People want cross-platform, native UI (i.e. not GTK) in a statically typed language higher level than C++. Even Go versions require a long compile time and don't work w/ the msvc toolchain and (IIRC) QT quick and QML are a bit hamstrung if you want to do advanced things with controls.

I would love full QT with a modern, high-level static language that is not hobbled on Windows. .Net may be the first to get there with a quality cross platform UI (Mono's WinForms are a bit hobbled too).

Re: I miss Delphi

#89

I'd love to hear what you think of Anvil ( https://anvil.works ) - it sounds like exactly what you're asking for. It's a very Delphi-like (or VB-like) tool for building web apps: Drag and drop for visual layout, then write code with a simple object model behind it. (It's 2017, so Python rather than Pascal - but more similar than it is different. Also built-in git repo, a built-in database, code completion, integratio…

I just tried the demo "MyCorp" anvil app: https://secure-portal.anvilapp.net/ It definitely feels bloated -- slow loading, tons of JS, overly engineered. Perhaps the demo should do something more substantial.

Thanks - yeah, there's a lot of optimisation still to do on load times. (We need some JS to let you write client-side code in Python, but we know we can load it a lot faster.)

I'm intrigued what smelt "overly engineered" to you, though. We're trying quite hard to keep the programming interface simple, so if something there offended you, that's good to know. (Or if it was another comment about load time, then...yeah. That just went up the bug tracker a bit.)

Re: I miss Delphi

#90

There's this http://www.unigui.com make all your web apps in Delphi :-), they've been in beta for a long time but seems to work.

The release candidate works great however what ultimately turned us away from this product was the fact that they only offer source code for the client components, you don't actually ever get to see the source code for the server, which is a big nono.
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