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Delphi's 25th Birthday

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Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#181

Post by SyneRyder »

vintagedave wrote: post #53
bencoder wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They used to give it away. I learnt to program from a free magazine cover-disk Delphi, and its excellent help system.

We give it away now too :) There is a Community edition, where the license terms are basically that you should buy it only if you make significant revenue. Students, hobbyists, early stage startups etc - free. https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter

I'm not sure that $5000 would count as significant revenue (I'd prefer an extra zero on that) but I suppose it's reasonable that if you earn enough from Delphi to pay for it, you should.

I can't find the new pricing on the website (everything is free trial / request a quote) but I remember the last time I saw pricing it was so much that I opted to kill the one Delphi-made product I had rather than upgrade. I'm using Xojo instead for my cross-platform RAD development now.

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#182

Post by ablekh »

Ah, sweet Delphi ... To this day, it remains the best visual development environment that I have experienced over 25+ years. Powerful - yet intuitive and simple - UI, blazingly fast compilation speed, rich sets of built-in and third-party visual component libraries. I have started with Turbo Pascal, which was certainly the breakthrough at the time, and have also worked with C++ Builder and a bit with Interbase & Firebird, but spent most of my Borland ecosystem time with Delphi. Recently, looking for potential better (Delphi-like) alternatives to modern convoluted world of Web development, I have explored Lazarus and several related projects, but none of them seems to provide the same comprehensive-yet-intuitive solution (backed by a solid company) that Delphi has done in the desktop development world. Perhaps, some good relevant projects will emerge in the future, but, until then, I will focus on mastering one of the "standard" modern Web development stacks (e.g., TypeScript + Vue) as well as exploring quite promising Blazor and, generally, WebAssembly technologies.

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#183

Post by nenadst »

vintagedave wrote: post #131
SnazzZG wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From reading the product-editions page, am I misunderstanding things or is the community version unable to even access a database? https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/product-editions I can't see students not needing DB access let alone 'early stage startups', without TDataSet et al, it would be effectively useless/worthless. (we're STILL using D5 where I work)

No - you can do everything in Community you can in Pro, the main paid edition. You can certainly use databases. We generally have a higher SKU for remote databases.

sorry but remote database = postgres, mysql (or any relational db server)

that is ridiculous in 2020

and you only get that with the "enterprise edition"

"professional" only gets you embeded and localhost DB ?!?

I still have my old separate Firedac licence for an old project i support, but anybody new coming to this mess will just have a good lough and move on.

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#184

Post by clouddrover »

nenadst wrote: post #183
vintagedave wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No - you can do everything in Community you can in Pro, the main paid edition. You can certainly use databases. We generally have a higher SKU for remote databases.

sorry but remote database = postgres, mysql (or any relational db server) that is ridiculous in 2020 and you only get that with the "enterprise edition" "professional" only gets you embeded and localhost DB ?!? I still have my old separate Firedac licence for an old project i support, but anybody new coming to this mess will just have a good lough and move on.

> sorry but remote database = postgres, mysql (or any relational db server)

You can use open source libraries like Zeoslib (https://zeoslib.sourceforge.io/) or mORMot (https://synopse.info/fossil/wiki?name=SQLite3+Framework).

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#185

Post by bjoli »

bmn__ wrote: post #145
sysrpl wrote: post #43

For those interested, Free Pascal and Lazarus, the free open source implementation of Delphi, is amazing. It has an active development community and works on most all platforms. https://www.getlazarus.org/learn/tutorials/introduction/

> Free Pascal and Lazarus […] is amazing. No, it is less than mediocre. It has not kept up at any sufficient pace to other languages and environments. Just a small excerpt because I don't have the nerve to write an exhaustive critique: bignum, first-class functions, generators, lazy lists, lexical scope, macros, namespaces. Single window in Lazarus requires recompilation that errors out in CheckLst.pas instead of bei…

What are your issues with scope in FPC? Namespaces have been supported since 3.0.

The other things I understand though. I much prefer Pascal syntax and compilation time, but I have started reaching for c++ these days

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#186

Post by SatNine20One »

imagine99 wrote: post #92
notriskfree wrote: post #51

Delphi is great; just ensure you always stay subscribed. Their tech support team regard properly managing their own strict license system as 'a courtesy' and will prevent you from installing the licensed software that you purchased. For that reason alone; I am out.

> will prevent you from installing the licensed software that you purchased Could you elaborate on that? I'm actually interested in procuring Delphi commercially after getting to know the free Community edition recently and I'd like to avoid any licensing pitfalls if possible. I can't really imagine how they would stop you from installing a properly licensed and purchased software but if they do, I'd be curious to kn…

Firstly: I liked Delphi a lot; learned it a long time ago.

Straight risk avoidance advice:- You need to install the Delphi software on a completely dedicated system that you never plan to reset; and image back it up; and hopefully that will work. And install the software on a Virtual Machine and back that up. And/Or always renew the subscription if the new features make any sense to you or not. Do these things and you will be Ok.

My experience was:

I am programming as a hobby; even so - I don't like to commit a huge amount of my personal evening and weekend time to software with a toy license that restricts what I can do with it.

In 2017; Delphi started to look good again; I got the starter edition; really liked it; found it useful; thought why not support the developers; and upgraded to the commercial version at 10.1; also purchased a number of really nice plugins; (used Delphi in my spare time project for a year or so); very happy with the results.

Stopped using it for a while; because my project was finished. I also messed around with Delphi on a couple of my systems while playing with mobile apps and Macs; found it much less useful there.

My main focus is windows desktop not mobile; I was playing around with new pre-release versions of Windows; I had to reset those systems when they got out of hand.

I ended up unable to reinstall 10.2 (my third party components need that.) So I contacted support; and was knocked back; with a cold email.

I guess the licensing methodology may be legal (not a lawyer); but it does not seem fair or reasonable to me.

I have written a lot of Delphi in projects I can not rebuild; I own several third party components that are now useless to me. The current version is I think 10.3; I was subscribed up until 10.2.

Other feedback

I think Delphi is good for Windows desktop programming; especially for GUIs that connect to data bases; nothing like as exceptional for Mac or Mobile. With respect to those databases you used to need the Enterprise version to use MySQL etc; as the lower license agreement did forbid the use of database services; only allowing local data.

I ended up spending many enjoyable hours learning or re-remembering how the database connections worked in Delphi; and figuring out how my third party components all worked; then enjoyed gluing them all together in my programs.

Where I am now: I could purchase the latest Delphi and update all my components; for no real benefit to my project; or I can learn to like .NET core and get translating. The third party components I used; are also available for .NET; and there are thousands of open source packages for .NET as well. Not so sure about the GUI.

How do they stop you?:

To be completely clear; because that company likes to be fuzzy about it; I have a valid license; serial number; invoice; and online account (which I really need to delete); I am blocked because I re-installed the software too many times. Where too many; was not very many; and was not even concurrent.

All the best with your project.

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#187

Post by SatNine20One »

robocat wrote: post #177
imagine99 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense, but that'd be like if you stopped eating your favourite vegetables because you once met an offensive vegan :-) Why would you move your ENTIRE company to a different language/development system because someone was rude at a conference? FWIW I felt out of place at conferences before, many are just an exercise in peacocking and showing off (and still, I have learnt some interesting things from some incredibl…

> so the [company] might be different, too I had an acquaintance who bought the most recent Delphi release (he’s a long term customer), but had some troubles so he installed the free community edition as a stop gap solution. They phoned him and bolloxed him and demanded he buy another copy, extremely rudely and extremely forcefully (almost as if the person calling had KPI’s for upsells). Unless I had a burning reason…

In my experience the company treat individual customers with something akin to contempt.

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#188

Post by tluyben2 »

justin66 wrote: post #160
mickeyp wrote: post #3

I loved Delphi. It was amazing. But then they ate their own future by going to the stratosphere with enterprisey tool acquisitions nobody remembers the names of any more; then they fell back down to earth, and flirted with Kylix -- Delphi for linux -- but at a time of great upheaval in the linux desktop world, and it never really took off either. Meanwhile, the former creator of Delphi had left for MS and created C#…

> flirted with Kylix -- Delphi for linux -- but at a time of great upheaval in the linux desktop world, and it never really took off either. It's worth noting that Kylix's failure to take off had a lot more to do with Borland's variously stupid, obnoxious and immoral business decisions than it had to do with the upheaval in the Linux desktop world. It was a strong enough concept for a product, and the base technology…

In the bubble they definitely thought they could not die; they were shooting up people who were aware of Linux made a lot of money from their shares at that time (if they sold in time as they never recovered). The CEO at the time acted like it would last forever and I guess he took the employees with him on a smugness ride. Such a shame as they could've gotten far as you say.

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#189

Post by bmn__ »

bjoli wrote: post #185
bmn__ wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Free Pascal and Lazarus […] is amazing. No, it is less than mediocre. It has not kept up at any sufficient pace to other languages and environments. Just a small excerpt because I don't have the nerve to write an exhaustive critique: bignum, first-class functions, generators, lazy lists, lexical scope, macros, namespaces. Single window in Lazarus requires recompilation that errors out in CheckLst.pas instead of bei…

What are your issues with scope in FPC? Namespaces have been supported since 3.0. The other things I understand though. I much prefer Pascal syntax and compilation time, but I have started reaching for c++ these days

> What are your issues with scope in FPC?

Simple begin/end should create a scope, cf. { … } in ES6 or Perl. Instead, to make it work, the programmer has to nest named procedures.

> Namespaces have been supported since 3.0.

Sorry, I did not notice. Apparently it's been available for 5 years, but the standard library or other popular libraries did not adopt the feature.

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#190

Post by fmxexpress »

nsomaru wrote: post #26
altmind wrote: post #9

For those missing Delphi, have you considered VS/C#/Winforms? I gonna tell you than its binaries as portable as Delphi/Kylix(e.g. major platforms covered). The language is much less annoying (oh how i hated Type and Var sections in the times). The gui programming style can be similar or can be modernized. The designer and component library is vastly improved. Third party components are cheap compared to today's "clou…

What’s a good tutorial for getting started building a cross platform Linux/OSX/Windows app using this stack? This coming from a python guy who is looking to build a native admin area for a web product.

This template project has a REST back end (sounds like you already have that) and demos connecting to it from native clients and from AngularJS. You don't have to do anything special to hit Windows/OSX/Linux with it. The one project will compile to all 3.

https://community.embarcadero.com/article/16560-deep-dive-ho...

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