Borland was really a pioneer, made great stuff.. Sad they couldn't survive the Microsoft onslaught both in terms of product and tactics.
Mastering Delphi 5 2025 Annotated Edition Is Now Complete
81–90 of 120 posts
Re: Mastering Delphi 5 2025 Annotated Edition Is Now Complete
#82I 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…
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Re: Mastering Delphi 5 2025 Annotated Edition Is Now Complete
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Xojo Web aims to do exactly what you describe. https://xojo.com/products/web.php I haven't really used it - I'm just a hobbyist coder who enjoys the VB6 style development of the desktop version of Xojo.
Wow, a quick cruise through the documentation suggests that this is EXACTLY the kind of thing I'm looking for!
I find myself waffling between "This is too expensive for me to play around with at home" and "Considering what this does, $399 really isn't that bad..."
Re: Mastering Delphi 5 2025 Annotated Edition Is Now Complete
#84I 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…
> For example, all layout was pixel based.
These sort of excuses always come up when Delphi and its insane productivity is mentioned. The same thing happens in conversations about how slow software has gotten.
High-DPI displays, internationalization, and accessibility are a pain but don't introduce enough complexity to hand-waive away the criticism.
Going a bit off-topic, but the browser is carrying around so many legacy concepts and ideas - it's a complete disaster - but it's the only option. The document object model is slow and weird to use to build reactive user interfaces.
We should demand something better. The browser is a local maximum as an application platform, and we should stop defending it.
Re: Mastering Delphi 5 2025 Annotated Edition Is Now Complete
#85I 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…
> And many apps that would benefit greatly from being resizable were non-resizeable instead, just because it was easier.
Maybe, but Delphi had anchor fields that you could use to make everything resize nicely.
The problem with that time period was that most applications were designed to not be resizeable, including most of the ones that came with Windows itself.
We still have that - some of the Windows programs right now can't be resized (Thinking specifically of dialogs and windows for device manager->driver details, or explorer->options).
This wasn't a Delphi problem at all; it was a Windows problem because that was the convention on Windows at the time.[1]
[1] EDIT: s/Windows/GUI systems/g
Re: Mastering Delphi 5 2025 Annotated Edition Is Now Complete
#86I 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…
Yep. I tried to find something similar. I tried Lazarus, Visual C#, Qt Studio. It's all a sad imitation of what we had with VB6 and Delphi.
> Yep. I tried to find something similar. I tried Lazarus, Visual C#, Qt Studio. It's all a sad imitation of what we had with VB6 and Delphi.
What's wrong with Lazarus, compared to Delphi?
Re: Mastering Delphi 5 2025 Annotated Edition Is Now Complete
#87Is this applicable to: https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
Yep, I'll have a major rich gui workstation client/server package with basic D365 functionality coming out in I hope about 8 months. Win, Linux, hopefully Mac, and browser. The browser version is definitely legacy gui compared to the native versions, just because it's browser.
> Yep, I'll have a major rich gui workstation client/server package with basic D365 functionality coming out in I hope about 8 months.
What's D365?
Re: Mastering Delphi 5 2025 Annotated Edition Is Now Complete
#88Interesting. Is it still runnable on Windows 10/11? I guess it would be still fun to use Delphi for personal projects.
> I guess it would be still fun to use Delphi for personal projects.
Like many of the other commenters here, I use Lazarus for Delphi projects in 2025 (Not just personal projects, but business projects too).
I don't really like the language too much, but:
1. Pascal (or Object Pascal) is very readable compared to almost anything else I've used[1]. I can come back to code from 2 years ago and spend a few minutes to context switch back into the language.
2. The language gotcha's are a small enough pain point that they are outweighed by the advantages of the type creation. I like being able to create a ranged integer type, which is then enforced by the compiler.
3. For most stuff, the majority of my logic is written using opaque types in C and then simply linked into the Lazarus GUI. I originally started using strong isolation and decoupling in C to enforce typing guarantees, but a side-effect of this is that it makes it exceptionally easy for other languages to reuse the program logic.
[1] I've been programming for money since the mid-90s, so you can assume that I've used almost everything that was mainstream (or top 10 in terms of popularity) each year since 1995.
Re: Mastering Delphi 5 2025 Annotated Edition Is Now Complete
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> And many apps that would benefit greatly from being resizable were non-resizeable instead, just because it was easier. Maybe, but Delphi had anchor fields that you could use to make everything resize nicely. The problem with that time period was that most applications were designed to not be resizeable, including most of the ones that came with Windows itself. We still have that - some of the Windows programs right…
> This wasn't a Delphi problem at all; it was a Windows problem because that was the convention on Windows at the time.
And I don't think other GUI systems were all that much better. Eg MacOS has plenty of fixed size stuff right now.
Re: Mastering Delphi 5 2025 Annotated Edition Is Now Complete
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And many apps that would benefit greatly from being resizable were non-resizeable instead, just because it was easier. Maybe, but Delphi had anchor fields that you could use to make everything resize nicely. The problem with that time period was that most applications were designed to not be resizeable, including most of the ones that came with Windows itself. We still have that - some of the Windows programs right…
> This wasn't a Delphi problem at all; it was a Windows problem because that was the convention on Windows at the time. And I don't think other GUI systems were all that much better. Eg MacOS has plenty of fixed size stuff right now.
Yeah; my comment specifically called out Windows, but to be fair, all the GUI systems at the time had the same restrictions.
It was convention across all GUI systems.