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Delphi still exists and is actively developed

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Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#121

Post by runjake »

hengheng wrote: post #70
panki27 wrote: post #60

One of the best aspects of Delphi is how quickly you can whip together simple GUI applications. The main issue nowadays is finding helpful resources on the internet, as hardly anybody writes Delphi anymore. For the interested, a free Delphi IDE exists (comes with FreePascal compiler): https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

Asking as someone who last saw Delphi in computer class at school, what would be the modern equivalent? Something that lets me draw a window with two number fields and a button that says "return sum", but it's two minutes of work and self-explanatory.

Windows Forms is probably the closest modern RAD equivalent of what you remember:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop/winforms/

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#123

Post by sigzero »

runjake wrote: post #120
mhd wrote: post #15

...for the enterprise. Which is okay, there's plenty of mixed quality software for that sector. It's just that Delphi used to be a lot more oriented towards beginner to small-business developers. And note that this happened before the web pillow-smothered decent desktop UIs. If it was all about a reduced audience for desktop-based applications and then supporting that, I would understand it more. I haven't been follo…

Delphi has a free community edition. The free version only targets Windows, though. https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter/free-dow...

That's kind of "too bad" it's Windows only. I would try it on Linux and/or macos.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#124

Post by unnouinceput »

sigzero wrote: post #123
runjake wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Delphi has a free community edition. The free version only targets Windows, though. https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter/free-dow...

That's kind of "too bad" it's Windows only. I would try it on Linux and/or macos.

Delphi IDE is available for Windows only, regardless of its version. I suspect @runjake meant is that the free version only targets Windows, while the architect edition of Delphi can target all of the major OS'es out there.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#125

Post by aidenn0 »

badsectoracula wrote: post #79
hengheng wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asking as someone who last saw Delphi in computer class at school, what would be the modern equivalent? Something that lets me draw a window with two number fields and a button that says "return sum", but it's two minutes of work and self-explanatory.

The linked Lazarus. Here is a quick screencast making a window with two fields and a button that sums them (though i forgot the "return sum" caption :-P) in ~45 seconds: https://i.imgur.com/cATdmhY.mp4

Is that Afterstep you are running? I'm having flashbacks to 1999...

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#126

Post by spapas82 »

kaba0 wrote: post #122

Could someone please explain/describe how GUI creation was done with Delphi? I tried to look up a video/wiki page but I don’t see what kind of abstraction did it use and why was it as liked?

You can try the lazarus ide https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ since it is more or less an open source version of delphi.

Tldr; it's a similar experience to vb6: drag n drop controls into a form, edit their properties and write code for their events...

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#127

Post by aidenn0 »

jhbadger wrote: post #81
optymizer wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in the ex-soviet countries, a lot of the legally-questionable software we used to write was in Pascal because that's what we learnt in school. It was an easy transition to go to Delphi - nice RAD IDE for GUI RATs or keygens/cracks, familiar OO language.

Even in the West, Pascal was the standard teaching language even in the late 1980s -- my undergraduate classes and textbooks all used it.

I took the AP CS test in 1996 and had to learn Pascal for it. They switched to a different language either in '97 or '98 though (C++ I think?).

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#128

Post by unnouinceput »

kaba0 wrote: post #122

Could someone please explain/describe how GUI creation was done with Delphi? I tried to look up a video/wiki page but I don’t see what kind of abstraction did it use and why was it as liked?

You mean how you open Delphi IDE, create a new project (default is Windows VCL, but you can also do cross-platform FireMonkey just as easy), then when the main form is presented in IDE how you drop components from the components palette? As in same way you do it in Visual Studio when doing a WPF and or/ Winforms project as well? Or as in any visual IDE for any programming language, because they all follow the same idea?

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#129

Post by auggierose »

magicalhippo wrote: post #119
yrgulation wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“ >150 input fields including multiple child tables up to levels 3 deep with their own grids” Yeah i’ve built single page apps with more input fields than this and grid tables all in a single view. Are you sure this cant be easily done? Coincidentally that was first 15 years ago with extjs, second time with react 3 years ago - the latter being a slower process but still pretty much doable.

> Are you sure this cant be easily done? No, I'm no web expert. We've not found a way so far, and I've not seen something like this on the web, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong. edit: to clarify, I don't doubt one can get 150 fields in a view on the web. But can one dev do it in one day and have it look great?

If you pay me £30000 and give me 3 months, and work with me to determine how your current designs look like, and what your current workflow is, I can make a react based environment for you to do your designs in just as quickly. If you pay me £60000, I do it in 2 months.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#130

Post by [deleted] »

magicalhippo wrote: post #108

We use Delphi at work. We've gotten a lot of pressure from customers to move to the web. However the lack of ways to design non-trivial UIs quickly does not make it seen feasible at the moment. Then there's the fact that Win32 is like bedrock in terms of stability. We've got forms that's been designed and coded over 15 years ago which still works just as fine as they did back then. We've got input-heavy UIs, the one…

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