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Delphi still exists and is actively developed

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Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#141

Post by mikewarot »

jaywalk wrote: post #132
magicalhippo wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I know nothing about Delphi, but I guarantee that I could take any UI you designed in a day in Delphi and get something equivalent on the web in the same amount of time. Sticking a bunch of inputs on a page (even with some nesting) isn't complex at all. I think you are doing your customers a great disservice by not learning about web development.

Can you guarantee it'll run on the same machine, with the same browser, in 5 years, with no changes?

Win32 is bedrock, the web is quicksand. Look at "HTTPS everywhere" and "you don't need FTP any more", which did little in terms of actual security, but broke almost everything in some small way.

The web doesn't value legacy. It's a petulant 22 year old, that thinks it knows everything, and does stuff deliberately against the advice of those with more experience.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#142

Post by dimitrios1 »

dimgl wrote: post #136
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…

> However the lack of ways to design non-trivial UIs quickly does not make it seen feasible at the moment. I'm... not sure this is true. There are plenty of ways of designing non-trivial UIs on the web.

There are indeed plenty of ways of designing non-trivial UIs on the web, but I am not sure any of them are that great, especially when you involve state. And there has been a mountain of pre-work done to make web UIs appear uniform across devices and browsers, and even with that pre-work done you still have issues on various mobile and tablet devices.

I'm kind of curious now.

Delphi claims you can "Build Native Apps 5x Faster With One Codebase For Windows, Android, iOS, macOS, and Linux" the biggest corollary I can think of there is Election, and we all know how we feel about Electron apps here.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#143

Post by slt2021 »

LeonB wrote: post #77
cowmix wrote: post #59

I remember going to a convention in 2005 for retail store software and I was amazed that Delphi dominated as the platform for POS systems.

I knew a pharmacist who wrote his own POS software in Delphi. It (and Visual Basic) had that position where they were so usable that even someone whose fulltime job was something else would be able to single handedly make a line of business app for that business.

it is amazing that you could just drop edit boxes and labels, hook up to data source and database and it will work without a single line of code written!

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#144

Post by Joeri »

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…

We've got input-heavy UIs, the one I'm working on right now is a single window with >150 input fields including multiple child tables up to levels 3 deep with their own grids.

I went through this transition in the late 2000’s, moving grid and form heavy delphi windows screens to webpages, using ExtJS, the only framework at the time which kind of sort of could do this.

The process made me realise two things:

1. if you try to map information-dense UI’s like that to the web, it will cost more to develop and the UX will be worse. (we saw double the dev cost and a slower and more cumbersome ui)

2. in most cases information-dense UI like that is bad design and should be avoided. I couldn’t see it back then how things could be done differently to make screens less dense, but looking back there were plenty of ways.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#147

Post by gavinray »

robin_reala wrote: post #104
jkaptur wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get a little frustrated, because the web is AMAZING for this. Type this in anywhere. Anywhere! sum function sum() { result.innerText = parseFloat(foo.value) + parseFloat(bar.value); } That's full of "bad practices" but for the use case you're talking about, who cares?

Side note, but can I introduce you to the element? You can just set its value instead of its innerText. It’s perfect for calculators. https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/form-elements.html#th...

What?! TIL, thanks.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#148

Post by mhd »

badsectoracula wrote: post #95
kwanbix wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they really screwed up after Delphi 7, when they did the horrible Delphi.NET. Also, they should have had some better pricing, something like: Personal use: Free. Commercial use: Free until you are making $x a year, like Unity I think, and then different prices. Note: I might remember wrong, as this was so long ago. I started with Delphi 1.0!

I think their original pricing scheme for the first 5 or 6 versions of Delphi was fine. The cheapest version was just $100, which even a student could buy by saving for a few weeks (get them hooked while young, etc :-P). The versions that added features focused on enterprises were more expensive but these wouldn't be needed by a lot of people (a lot of Delphi programmers were making small shareware utilities instead…

I have a "Delphi for Kids" book which included a free version of the lowest Delphi tier. And yes, sure, I guess you can do the same with the current community version, but it does show how broadly Delphi was aimed and received.

Which is the sad thing. Even if Idera were to change their tack, it wouldn't matter anymore, as there's no broad appeal for a "desktop full stack" solution anymore.

Right now, it doesn't matter anyway. They're in that enterprise tier along with commercial Smalltalks and APLs, even if they'd give away everything for free tomorrow it wouldn't change the world of computing.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#149

Post by robocat »

robin_reala wrote: post #104
jkaptur wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get a little frustrated, because the web is AMAZING for this. Type this in anywhere. Anywhere! sum function sum() { result.innerText = parseFloat(foo.value) + parseFloat(bar.value); } That's full of "bad practices" but for the use case you're talking about, who cares?

Side note, but can I introduce you to the element? You can just set its value instead of its innerText. It’s perfect for calculators. https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/form-elements.html#th...

Interesting. MDN link: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ou...

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#150

Post by stuaxo »

unnouinceput wrote: post #124
sigzero wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a shame, I guess Kylix just died in the end ?
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