Nobody mentioned the form inheritance feature of the VCL, the consequent applying of OOP principles for UI. Because all interface elements are implemented as (object) components, in Delphi, you can easily group an arbitrary assembly of UI elements in a frame object and make it readily available as a new “component” for reuse; a great way to reuse standard design in big commercial applications. Another way of accelerating the production is to design similar screens as subclasses of a common screen. You can pack then all the common functionality in the ancestor screen and don’t waste time to copy-paste or worrying about error propagation. Of course, one can group common functionality in classes or procedures but UI functionality is very often bound to a certain UI element and not generic. Thus form inheritance is much more efficient than the (otherwise) standard practice. I designed once an application for museum management with a lot of different working screens but they are similar in some functionality. Using form inheritance I could avoid designing big generic working screens, which could be very confusing and annoying for the users, but offer instead specific screens for specific tasks and still saving a lot of time (and debugging headache). I estimate using form inheritance in Delphi helped me at the time to increase the productivity of the UI implementation phase up to the factor of 5! I guess other systems could do similar things but not as elegant as Delphi though.
In term of desktop applications, I believe none other can be as productive as Delphi.
24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today
131–140 of 167 posts
Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the $1000 price tag is totally wrong. I would never pay that kind of money for an IDE unless it was _really_ better than anything else. But this means: - the language has huge community (so I'm not stuck with a dying language) - it allows me to do anything (huge extensibility) Unfortunately it is difficult to change the pricing model once you have existing clients. On one hand they are the only ones paying fo…
I mean companies pay that and more to become Microsoft shops, at least before .NET Core and Visual Studio Code, and this isn'. I agree entirely with you. I would love to learn Delphi from a hobbyist perspective, can I get a license for like $299 or around that range? No? Hell why isn't there a freebie edition anymore. Except, I can get all of Visual Studio for free for Community use, and yet I can't get a completely…
Since July last year, a free Community Edition of both Delphi and C++ Builder has been available.
Feature wise, it is essential the Professional edition with a few license limitations.
Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today
#133Nobody mentioned the form inheritance feature of the VCL, the consequent applying of OOP principles for UI. Because all interface elements are implemented as (object) components, in Delphi, you can easily group an arbitrary assembly of UI elements in a frame object and make it readily available as a new “component” for reuse; a great way to reuse standard design in big commercial applications. Another way of accelera…
Windows Forms inherited this concept given Anders. :)
Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today
#134The article mentions that the binary size of the listbox example is significantly different. Well, we used to say that Delphi 1 is totally wasteful as the default empty project compiled into 39kB .exe, obviously full of bloat ;) Edit: 39kB was nothing even in the 1995. But there was other more significant issue: if you went for all the database and line of bussines suport libraries you ended up with application that…
140KB+ for that simple app even in 1995 would've been an insane level of bloat, considering that the Windows 3.1 Program Manager (PROGMAN.EXE) also shown in the screenshots is only 112KB, and it certainly has much more functionality. The File Manager, WINFILE.EXE, is 167KB. As an experienced native Win32 programmer, the same thing in pure Win32 would be What's even more disturbing is the fact that an app which does t…
Now compare Delphi in 1995 with Electron in 2019....
Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are correct, saying 'large portion of the library' was a mistake. But as I remember, you don't have access to the VCL source code with the Community Edition. The feature matrix says that this is 'limited in Community', whatever that means. We wanted to do MongoDB connections, which comes with FireDAC. But that's only available in the Enterprise Edition. So we ended up rewriting TMongoWire[0] to fit our needs. I a…
Oh FireDAC is no longer available for Professional version either? Geez.. really not going to lay down $3k for an EE. How is that "professional" if you cannot even read/write to sqlite.
This is incorrect. I have Pro. I use FireDAC. SQLite can be used with Pro.
Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today
#136I forgot that Delphi was sort of a mash-up of Visual Basic and Pascal. Two great tastes, I guess. Are there contemporary products -- for building mobile and/or web apps -- that are similarly easy to use?
You can build native multi-platform apps with Delphi.
The free Community Edition supports, Windows, macOS, iOS and Android development.
With third party component stacks you can build and transpile Object Pascal to JavaScript with Delphi too.
Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today
#137What's today's equivalent? Something that can produce native binaries for at least windows, mac, linux? The one I see pushed a lot is electron, and there are some cool ideas, but nothing stable that I know of.
Delphi can produce native binaries for the major platforms: Windows, macOS, Linux (Currently Enterprise version only, requires third party library for GUI), Android, iOS.
The free Community Edition supports the platforms above, minus Linux.
Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the $1000 price tag is totally wrong. I would never pay that kind of money for an IDE unless it was _really_ better than anything else. But this means: - the language has huge community (so I'm not stuck with a dying language) - it allows me to do anything (huge extensibility) Unfortunately it is difficult to change the pricing model once you have existing clients. On one hand they are the only ones paying fo…
I mean companies pay that and more to become Microsoft shops, at least before .NET Core and Visual Studio Code, and this isn'. I agree entirely with you. I would love to learn Delphi from a hobbyist perspective, can I get a license for like $299 or around that range? No? Hell why isn't there a freebie edition anymore. Except, I can get all of Visual Studio for free for Community use, and yet I can't get a completely…
Delphi does compile to Linux. With the FMXLinux third party add on the Delphi FireMonkey framework compiles apps to iOS/Android/Windows/macOS32/Linux with a single UI and single codebase.
Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today
#139We use Delphi, because we are productive with it, but it is seriously sorry. Yes, you can develop 64 bit apps with it, but the IDE is still a 32 bit app, which causes problems with large projects. The Indy components (e.g. http) are unsafe and shitty. Personally I don't think there is much to recommend.
You don't necessarily have to use Indy.
There are several open source and commercial network stacks available for Delphi that works across supported platforms.
Also, since Delphi XE8, components for proper HTTP handling, that taps into the host platforms native implementation, has been available. They work really great.
Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today
#140Delphi was a great way to get into programming as a kid. You could just drop an image and a timer onto a form, set it to 50ms, edit the onElapse event to move the image according to key-presses, and you've got the start of a simple game! All in a way that is visual and makes intuitive sense to any non-programmer. And the beauty of the language/IDE was that you could develop serious, complex applications with it, too.…
There are lots of drag and drop tools on the market. Why not just download the Delphi Community Edition for your hobby projects though? It's free.