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Delphi still exists and is actively developed

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Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#211

Post by rossmohax »

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…

Did you need to do anything to support HiDPI displays in those 10+ years old forms?

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#212

Post by yrgulation »

watwut wrote: post #205
junon wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Err... Yeah, depending on what you mean by "field", the answer is yes. In one day it is possible to stick 150 fields in an HTML document and apply some CSS to make it look nice.

Including functionality? Like including making them do what they are supposed to do? From what I recall about Delphi from years ago there is massive difference in amount of boilerplate and wiring to make stuff work. Delphi has almost none, while most tech I have seen on web has a lot of it.

Depends. Slow development frameworks such as react or vue may take a while. Vanilla js with something like axios should be straight forward. All you need is calls back and forth to your server to fetch and apply data. A trivial thing.

Edit: However, my challenge is on wether it can be done or not. Delphi is cool, and tbh any tool you are an expert in will let you do something quicker than a tool thats new for you. It will probably take me a while to achieve the same goal in delphi.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#213

Post by Joker_vD »

fomine3 wrote: post #200
Joker_vD wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. I've tried to pick up WPF but holy fatcats, what an explosion of XAML files in exchange for... pretty much nothing, really. It's a shame, really.

You can ignore XAML if you make WPF app as like WinForms, just use GUI designer and absolute layout. It's not considered to good but it should work.

But in that case, why even use WPF if I can just keep using WinForms? Besides, judging by the news and announcements on the Microsoft site, it would seem that WinForms is still being sort of developed while WPF is... pretty much dead.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#214

Post by mhuffman »

magicalhippo wrote: post #210
mhuffman wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How do you handle the transition at 2:04 where "Last Name" is moved from its own row to sharing a row with "First Name"? Keep in mind I might want to add a third element in that row afterwards. This is pretty simple with CSS grid -- literally takes a couple of seconds. I am a fan of Delphi, and used it myself in the late 90s, but I think you just might just give it more credit due to familiarity. There are benefits…

> I think you just might just give it more credit due to familiarity. Fair enough. I've tried searching for these things but it's very hard to find good resources. So far I've not found a way to do this with similar ease, but from this thread it seems it might be possible after all. Some concrete examples or resources would be much appreciated. > There are benefits to a web-app these days Sure, I definitely see the p…

>Some concrete examples or resources would be much appreciated.

Ok. I am not sure of your current front-end experience level, so I will give pointers as if you are not experienced with CSS grid, forgive me if this is incorrect.

The key CSS items in this case would be:

display: grid;

... which will allow for CSS grid layout, and then for the particular item you discussed, the following two CSS values would do the trick.

grid-template-areas .... for the layout container itself in a pseudo-visual way, and grid-area for the items to be laid out.

Here[1] is a simple example, but if you are a visual-type person would get the idea across.

[1]https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/grid-templa...

The demo at the top of the page is interactive and you can see how easy it is to move around items. Of course these items would already be styled themselves to maintain label positioning and alignment so simply moving the letters in the grid-template-areas value would be sufficient to completely change the layout.

This does not let you drag and drop as in your demo, but it is equally fast and gives instant visual feedback in the browser.

As a side note, I morn daily the continuing loss of desktop applications, which is where I cut my teeth in development. But the explosion of platforms and continued aggression from OS manufactures in the name of "safety" is basically forcing the hands of people to move to web apps. I agree that, in general, they are not as snappy or as light-weight as a well-designed desktop application (a "real" one, not an electron app), but if you know what you are doing you can get close and get all the benefits that do come with web apps.

And, from someone that has done both desktop and web app development, web apps can be laid out very quickly if you have experience. I almost can not think of a single-page (non-animated) application that I can't layout in a single day. This is especially true if you are using an existing UI framework or you have built-up one of your own over time. The time-consuming parts tend to be testing on multiple platforms/screen-sizes for compatibility (iOS being the worst) and the business logic.

Let me know if that is not the type of info you were looking for, and I will be happy to point you in a direction to get the info you are looking for.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#215

Post by Delphiza »

kaba0 wrote: post #140
unnouinceput wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 id…

I guess? I was interested in whether it had some unique feature/paradigm, or was it loved for some other reason.

What it did well was data binding of UI controls to SQL databases. A form would be linked to a database viewmodel (ish) where you could drop sql connections and tables to link up to a UI. Delphi (the vcl) took care of everything. You could put an editable grid on a page and all CRUD would _just work_

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#216

Post by fomine3 »

Joker_vD wrote: post #213
fomine3 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can ignore XAML if you make WPF app as like WinForms, just use GUI designer and absolute layout. It's not considered to good but it should work.

But in that case, why even use WPF if I can just keep using WinForms? Besides, judging by the news and announcements on the Microsoft site, it would seem that WinForms is still being sort of developed while WPF is... pretty much dead.

You can easily adopt WPF features later, compared to migrate WinForms to WPF. I think both WinForms and WPF are being sort of developed, but WinForms is old so it have more developing needed area, like accessibility and HiDPI.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#218

Post by magicalhippo »

mhuffman wrote: post #214
magicalhippo wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think you just might just give it more credit due to familiarity. Fair enough. I've tried searching for these things but it's very hard to find good resources. So far I've not found a way to do this with similar ease, but from this thread it seems it might be possible after all. Some concrete examples or resources would be much appreciated. > There are benefits to a web-app these days Sure, I definitely see the p…

>Some concrete examples or resources would be much appreciated. Ok. I am not sure of your current front-end experience level, so I will give pointers as if you are not experienced with CSS grid, forgive me if this is incorrect. The key CSS items in this case would be: display: grid; ... which will allow for CSS grid layout, and then for the particular item you discussed, the following two CSS values would do the tric…

Ah excellent, thank you very much.

Will definitely take another stab using this. I'm assuming the grids compose, so I can work on one group (say name-address set) and it'll be well behaved when added into a larger layout grid.

The WYSIWYG drag and drop is nice, but if the results are predictable enough a manual "edit-and-run" cycle should suffice.

> Of course these items would already be styled themselves to maintain label positioning and alignment

So I guess this is the only thing I'd still be struggling with. Concretely, consider a grid layout like this:

    a b
    c c
    d e
Here each cell has a label and a text input. Here the labels and inputs in a and d, as well as b and e, should automatically line up vertically, including if say b's label changes due to a dynamic event.

I'll have to see if it's easier with the grid layout.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#219

Post by jamier1978 »

unpeasant wrote: post #217

Went for a job interview last year and the tech stack was an API built in Delphi, on Macs, using a virtual machine running Windows. Company was doing well from it, but trying to scale, and finding anyone to code delphi was impossible.

As someone who worked with Delphi for many years I've often wondered if there is a lot of money to be made by charging companies to work on these codebases. As much as I liked Delphi back in the day, low job satisfaction puts me off looking in to the idea.
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