Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I miss Delphi

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 194 posts

Re: I miss Delphi

#111

Post by TimJYoung »

gregmac wrote: post #97

In short: because the web is inherently stateless and it's much harder to deal with than stateful UIs. I last used Delphi back around the turn of the century, so I'm remembering it as a drag-and-drop Windows UI framework/builder. ASP.NET WebForms is the most similar thing I've used (and it's been at least 5 or 6 years since I last really used it). I would not recommend investing a lot of time in it. WebForms is great…

Single-page web applications that get loaded once and stay loaded, and are primarily driven by JS code, don't have any of these negative attributes. State is kept in memory, just as it is with a desktop application. There is no need to shuttle around large amounts of state, other than what is needed to authenticate against/communicate with the back-end APIs.

Re: I miss Delphi

#113

Post by lallysingh »

TimJYoung wrote: post #94

I hope that isn't considered too much self-promotion, but it's on topic. You can have what you want with our product, Elevate Web Builder. It creates single-page web applications in a Delphi-like IDE: http://www.elevatesoft.com/products?category=ewb&type=web (examples at the bottom) We're releasing version 2.06 shortly, and it has much-improved designer drawing performance and design-time/run-time layout performance.…

AFAIK, HN typically encourages plugging your own product.

Re: I miss Delphi

#114

Post by TimJYoung »

lj3 wrote: post #59
baq wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

webassembly + full page canvas. games already work like that. hopefully sanity is just around the corner.

Wouldn't Canvas need more advanced text handling for that to be practical? I know that's a big reason canvas based frameworks never took off.

The problem with using the canvas functionality for everything is that it's an all-or-nothing proposition, and you end up having to write a lot of stuff that is already handled by the browser, or can only be handled by the browser (think bi-directional text/NLS issues).

Re: I miss Delphi

#115

Post by pjmlp »

nottorp wrote: post #102
clouddrover wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most of us can't wait to jump to C# Why?

Little historical fact, Microsoft nicked Andreas Hejlsberg, the creator of the Borland flavor of Pascal (starting from the Turbo Pascal days), and had him architect C#. So if you trust microsoft, or you're doing boring bussiness software where you don't care about anything but the paycheck, C# may be an improvement.

Yep, Delphi's soul lives a little bit in C#. Also a reason why I was quite disappointed of .NET being NGEN + JIT, instead of pure native compilation like Delphi.

At least, WP 8.x brought us MDIL, followed by .NET Native and CoreRT.

Also Anders and his team work on Typescript is quite good.

Re: I miss Delphi

#116

Post by meredydd »

degenerate wrote: post #103
meredydd wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I mean the demo feels over-engineered. Create an account, activate account by email, and login... just to download a 1-page pdf. I understand that the point of the demo was to show the ability to create a working web-app, but a better demo would showcase something with more meat than a single file download. Perhaps a simple twitter clone with file attachments or something along those lines instead of a file download…

Aha! Yeah, that makes sense. It descends from a use case a consulting client had a while ago (for which they ended up with a $X0,000 Salesforce deployment instead of something I could build in an afternoon with Anvil, and in a few days without it). Clearly not an obviously accessible example - we'll fix that up a little :)

("Twitter clone with attachments" is one we use in workshops, actually - it fits neatly into a single session. Guess I should write that up.)

Re: I miss Delphi

#117

Post by btschaegg »

Yetanfou wrote: post #43
supercoder wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just make sure to avoid Apollo release nr. 13 as it is rumoured to contain a nasty bug. Something with some storage method causing it to blow up I think it was.

I thought someone proposed a fix for the AGC module?

So, you should be safe with v. 11...

Re: I miss Delphi

#118

Post by laythea »

realharo wrote: post #20

Simple is subjective. I find the React way of making web UIs, where you just write a `render` function, way simpler than manually mutating existing UI widgets to match the data every time it changes. Or some weird manual data binding via model wrappers. Maybe it's a tiny bit more code in the very beginning, but it becomes worth it very soon (as soon as you get past hello world pretty much). That being said, we could…

Your talking about the difference between immediate mode vs retained mode, immediate mode being the "self contained render" method. This is nice and clean up to a point in complexity, and then the advantages of retained mode (or "manually mutating existing UI widgets to match the data every time it changes") outweigh the disadvantages, namely the management of the UI/data interface.

Re: I miss Delphi

#120

Post by mamcx »

Because web development is broken by design.

Or more exactly, web development was turned (badly) into app development.

Post reply on HN