Congrats! My new software (https://DocxManager.com - site builder and document manager) is built with Delphi :)
Delphi's 25th Birthday
191–199 of 199 posts
Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whats the problem with the REST Api's, I haven't tried it but thought it would just be a matter of dropping some TDataSources and so on?
The built-in REST library is verbose and tedious, and it doesn't do HTTP pipelining which means any non-trival API over HTTPS will be slow as a dodo (though maybe they fixed this recently, haven't checked latest version). In addition, the built-in JSON stuff is also tedious to use, I found SecureBlackBox's variant with some class helper to provide basic XPath-like access to be quite a lot more ergonomic to use. But J…
Thanks for the info
Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday
#193Someone wrote a full audio tracker with ASIO, VST etc. in delphi in the 90s; a pretty impressive feat. Its still avaliable: http://www.madtracker.org/main.php Thread talking about it: https://www.madtracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=180&sid=7df...
Well, as opposed to your average RAD medium, in Delphi you could even sprinkle pieces of assembly in the middle of your Pascal code. So you could basically do anything with it, all the time not worrying about aligning buttons on a form because it was piss easy.
Yeah, i spoke to the guy who wrote it and he used a lot of assembly optimization.
Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday
#194I find it ironic they describe it as “25 Years of Excellence” because, as much as people go on about the competition, what really broke Delphi was its poor quality control I bloody loved that language, but all of the components had serious errors that resulted in crashes. To make it worse, they are their own dog food, meaning the IDE itself crashed all the time. This wouldn’t have been so bad, but then VB5 happened,…
Never had the problems you mention till Delphi 7.
I always found the even versions (D4,D6) buggy while D5 and D7 were very reliable.
D4 had bugs in its COM code. In 2000 I worked at a Dotcom (homedirectory.com) and we used a D4 COM search component running in SQL Server 6.5. It used to crash when the CPU load went above 5%. I guessed it was D4, recompiled under D5 and that fixed it.
Microsoft as part of its settlement to Borland over the employee poaching (including AH) provided technical info that let D5 generate reliable COM code.
Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday
#195I learnt Pascal at Uni in the late 1970s and programmed in Turbo Pascal from 1986 on and then Delphi D2 since 1997. Slightly off-topic but two of my applications written in Turbo Pascal:Warlord and Quest, in the period 1988-1990 are still in use today. Both are postal games now run on the internet by kjcgames.com.
I'm currently maintaining and extending a major proptech application with 1.3 million loc of Delphi (XE7). Not so long ago the firm bought another firm with its own a 1.3 million loc of D7 code! There's still a lot of Delphi code about.
Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
.NET only became open very recently, it's been quite successful. The entire iOS/Apple developer ecosystem is closed source of course. Maybe Swift isn't but nobody uses it outside the Apple platform. You could argue Microsoft is an exception and them opening .NET shows the end of that era though. The "open source or nothing" mentality might change in future. It means there's not much market for developer tools, so eve…
Hmmm. Agreeing with the sentiment of your argument while looking at the flip side of the coin, the fruit borne of the ad-hoc lack of coordination you describe is sadly easily overwhelmed by domain domination exerted from committees and bureaucracies with vested interests in specific fields. Which kind of information-leaks that either VR is hype noone really cares about, or that none of said committees (with attendant…
Yes, there's a certain robustness that comes from an evolutionary approach. And some of the web's competitors died because they couldn't (in my view) correctly analyse and match the web's strengths, because those strengths were never planned or written down anywhere. Figuring out why the web is strong is sort of like trying to figure out how our own bodies work. Sure, we can see the component parts. How they come together to make the whole a success is often less clear.
On the other hand, let's not kid ourselves. The web wasn't actually built by making a melting pot of diverse ideas with an evolutionary process to select between them. The web has always been controlled by one dominant company, and the stuff that gets added (or not) reflects the agenda of their internal committees. The web went from being controlled very, very briefly by Tim BL to being controlled by Netscape who added forms, cookies, JavaScript, CSS etc. Then to Microsoft, who added a pile of other stuff and then froze development for years whilst Mozilla tried to get off the ground.
Mozilla added relatively little to the web given the resources invested into Firefox; virtually all their energy went into trying to fix their own architectural mis-fires. Then WebKit came along and very briefly Apple was in charge. That era didn't last long until Google came along and took the crown, which they've had ever since. Unlike Apple and Mozilla, Google actually have added a lot of stuff to the web platform but it reflects a consumer driven agenda. Hence WebVR, WebRTC etc.
To the extent the other players exerted any influence on the Chrome team during this time it's - in my view - been mostly negative. Mozilla lost to Chrome because their technical choices just weren't that good, but they've continued to exercise outsized influence on decision making despite dwindling market share.
Additionally the lack of any real support for libraries or dependencies in the web platform means many of the new APIs added to HTML can't be challenged by competitors. WebAudio sucks but nobody can make a better one because of the sandbox.
In the end the web isn't really the result of ad-hoc coordination so much as a dysfunctional lurching tug-of-war between different groups of engineers who all work down the road from each other at different firms in California (with a detour through Seattle).
Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the main embarcadero.com website, hover over 'Free Tools' and click 'Delphi Community Edition'. You're right, it is not very visible by going to the normal Delphi page. Not sure why - I think our website folk want to push people to the trial not Community. But here's the link: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter
Sorry, after reading about the install limits I lost all interest.
What install limits? I don't really understand what you're talking about, I'm afraid.
Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
...although language features, 64bit, and integration with C++ were never really where my quarrels were. If we take "rapid application development" out of its trademarked context, applying just its common-sense meaning, and applying it to the year 2020, then the modern tech ecosystem that one would want to integrate with is clearly not C++, but rather maybe JavaScript & the browser ecosystem, Python, and low-overhead…
Haha. 10 minutes further into my Delphi-in-2020-exploration (60% of which was the time that the installer actually took), this was the sequence of events: * Hit the installer and switched windows, to let the installer work in the background. * Installer mysteriously gone. * Tried to run the programme, and it took some digging to understand that the product seems to be in a half-installed state. * Re-run the installer…
Sorry to hear it crashed. And no idea re the installer. Just out of interest, did you file a bug report? Because I've been using the grid layout recently and have not seen an error.
> Oh gosh. Form designer still using pixel-based layouts.
If you build a desktop app, you'll get pixel-based layouts, because that's how Windows works. It is fully high DPI enabled and scalable, so it's not accurate really to call the units pixels. Call them design units or similar.
As you noted there are various layout tools, from containers with various flow behaviours, through to anchors and padding.
Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure what you mean there, sorry.
It is quite simple. I mean that if you install the software N times; perhaps because you often switch and rebuild machines; and you do not have a current subscription; Dennis in tech support will not reset your license registration limit; and you will never be able to install the software again.
If that happened, it is an error. I believe the flow these days is to go through Sales, but you do not have to buy or have a current subscription to install.
I'll repeat that: You can install a hundred times if you need. You do not have to buy or have a current subscription to install.
The license server counts installations and flags for verification after a certain number because it's quite common for people to install far more times (ie, for more people) than they actually bought. All that is required after you install a one-person license enough times to trigger the server asking questions is to contact us and let us know you really are using it legally. Then you're good to go.