Mastering Delphi 5 2025 Annotated Edition Is Now Complete

Post by sheepscreek » Mon, Mar 24, 2025, 11:28 PM UTC

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…

Post by magicalhippo » Mon, Mar 24, 2025, 11:52 PM UTC

marcocantu wrote: post #20

magicalhippo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be surprised if Delphi 5 ran without a hitch on Windows 10/11. On the other hand, I'd also be surprised if the code couldn't be ported as-is, with just some minor tweaks if any, to the latest Delphi release (released this month). The transition to Unicode strings was a breaking change that did have some impact, but if the code used string manipulation routines instead of direct byte manipulation it should wor…

I rebuild a large number of demos with no change. Well, the UI looks date, you need to manually enable HighDPI (one checkbox away), do a few tweaks. The IDE plugins, those are broken. And some libraries don't ship any more.

Post by 800xl » Tue, Mar 25, 2025, 12:12 AM UTC

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #45

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 Microsof…

Post by mattl » Tue, Mar 25, 2025, 12:25 AM UTC

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…

Post by phendrenad2 » Tue, Mar 25, 2025, 12:31 AM UTC

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…