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Mastering Delphi 5 2025 Annotated Edition Is Now Complete

blog.marcocantu.com

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Re: Mastering Delphi 5 2025 Annotated Edition Is Now Complete

#43

Post by starik36 »

Ao7bei3s wrote: post #26
FeistySkink wrote: post #6

I feel like Delphi, along with maybe VB6 and WinForms, have been the pinnacle of easy UI development, and things have gone significantly downhill since then. Especially on the web side, where even a single view sometimes requires having multiple unrelated dependencies (packers, builders, transpilers, etc.), often implicitly-configured to produce output, in head-space. And due to this dependency hell, when porting a p…

Delphi and Visual Basic 6 were definitely not the pinnacle of UI development. For example, all layout was pixel based. Making windows resizable required much complex ad-hoc code, and internationalization was hard as well. Very early in my career, I have spent person months clicking through every single screen in a large desktop application to find words cut off due to words having different lengths (measured in pixel…

VB6 (and its predecessors) didn't ship with windows resizing and alignment out of the box, but there were 3rd party components that did that nicely. This happened way before Java.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160406102051/http://vbrad.com/...

Re: Mastering Delphi 5 2025 Annotated Edition Is Now Complete

#44

Post by zerr »

visarga wrote: post #41

I loved Delphi 1 ages ago but I won't fork thousands of dollars for a language.

Agree. Making everything free (including the freedom, e.g. MIT license): SDK, cmdline tools, etc... And only charging for IDE/RAD environment would enormously boost the language popularity.

The same goes for Eiffel.

Re: Mastering Delphi 5 2025 Annotated Edition Is Now Complete

#45

Post by Mister_Snuggles »

FeistySkink wrote: post #6

I feel like Delphi, along with maybe VB6 and WinForms, have been the pinnacle of easy UI development, and things have gone significantly downhill since then. Especially on the web side, where even a single view sometimes requires having multiple unrelated dependencies (packers, builders, transpilers, etc.), often implicitly-configured to produce output, in head-space. And due to this dependency hell, when porting a p…

I would love something like Delphi/VB6, but made for web development.

My day job involves working with PeopleTools, which basically does this. Draw forms (and build all of the supporting objects), save them, and they're accessible through a web browser. You don't need to know HTML, CSS, JS, etc (though it can help), and you can knock out a very based CRUD form in no time without writing any code.

I think the Microsoft Power Platform has features similar to this as well.

But neither of these options are very accessible to regular folks. Something that has the ease of development of Delphi, the deployment simplicity that comes with presenting the application via a web browser, and is accessible to regular folks would be incredible.

Re: Mastering Delphi 5 2025 Annotated Edition Is Now Complete

#46

Post by bluedino »

johanstokking wrote: post #40
FeistySkink wrote: post #6

I feel like Delphi, along with maybe VB6 and WinForms, have been the pinnacle of easy UI development, and things have gone significantly downhill since then. Especially on the web side, where even a single view sometimes requires having multiple unrelated dependencies (packers, builders, transpilers, etc.), often implicitly-configured to produce output, in head-space. And due to this dependency hell, when porting a p…

And these programs, compiled in the ninetees, still run today on modern Windows with a functional UI. Microsoft, Borland and others then built developer tools and platforms to last. I think that cross-platform (including web) and touch changed the game because it wasn’t a simple and controlled ecosystem anymore. All of Microsoft’s successors to Win32 seem to be replaced sooner or later by something else, even in the…

> There’s probably still a lot of critical Windows enterprise software being maintained that needs consulting and support.

At my old company, it took 2 years and $2 million to re-write an application in Java. That's the cheapest project that Accenture would take.

So as long as you keep your legacy service contracts under that, you're fine. It might even be $3 million now with the new Java licensing terms.

Re: Mastering Delphi 5 2025 Annotated Edition Is Now Complete

#47

Post by bluedino »

Ao7bei3s wrote: post #26
FeistySkink wrote: post #6

I feel like Delphi, along with maybe VB6 and WinForms, have been the pinnacle of easy UI development, and things have gone significantly downhill since then. Especially on the web side, where even a single view sometimes requires having multiple unrelated dependencies (packers, builders, transpilers, etc.), often implicitly-configured to produce output, in head-space. And due to this dependency hell, when porting a p…

Delphi and Visual Basic 6 were definitely not the pinnacle of UI development. For example, all layout was pixel based. Making windows resizable required much complex ad-hoc code, and internationalization was hard as well. Very early in my career, I have spent person months clicking through every single screen in a large desktop application to find words cut off due to words having different lengths (measured in pixel…

I came from Visual C++/Basic world when I first got my Mac and dove into Xcode for the first time (2002? 2003?). Flexible layouts, connecting UI elements to datasources, localization...

Oh my was I amazed.

Re: Mastering Delphi 5 2025 Annotated Edition Is Now Complete

#49

Post by badsectoracula »

theamk wrote: post #29
FeistySkink wrote: post #6

I feel like Delphi, along with maybe VB6 and WinForms, have been the pinnacle of easy UI development, and things have gone significantly downhill since then. Especially on the web side, where even a single view sometimes requires having multiple unrelated dependencies (packers, builders, transpilers, etc.), often implicitly-configured to produce output, in head-space. And due to this dependency hell, when porting a p…

Agree, Delphi was extremely nice way to do UI development.. I've made many small GUIs for everyday tasks back when I was using it. Unfortunately "dependency hell" was very real -- it was super-easy to download ActiveX controls, install on the system, and then depend on them in the apps. Worse, Windows had a single ActiveX database per computer, and an control installed by a completely unrelated app would appear in th…

FWIW ActiveX specifically was really more so that Delphi is able to use the Visual Basic stuff than something native to Delphi. Components made for Delphi specifically are (usually) compiled as part of the final executable without needing ActiveX.

In fact AFAIK ActiveX support in Delphi was implemented by generating a wrapper component that converted the ActiveX control stuff to what Delphi "naturally" speaks.

For forms, even in Delphi 2 you can use the "align" property in several controls to automatically position them inside a container using the top, bottom, left, right and client area. The areas also stack so you can, e.g., position several controls at the top area and you'd get an effect similar to what a VBox container would provide in other toolkits. Though the initial versions of Delphi did not have this available everywhere, it was added to various controls over time.

Later versions also added "anchors" so that you can drag-drop stuff visually to the form but also have them resize automatically based on the parent's size. Lazarus (sort of open source Delphi-like IDE) extended this to allow anchoring stuff related to other control (so, e.g., you could have a button's right side a few pixels from another button's left side and that button's right side be a few pixels from the container's right side, or have a label be placed at the middle of an input box, or other stuff like that).

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