101–110 of 120 posts
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> 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.
Borland was really a pioneer, made great stuff.. Sad they couldn't survive the Microsoft onslaught both in terms of product and tactics.
They drank every last drop of the enterprise kool-aid, and put Delphi on life support when spinnig it off failed[1], just as Microsoft got some .Net momentum going.
A lot of Delphi developers saw the signs and jumped ship during those years.
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…
These web apps show tables with data, images with figures, and some controls to request calculations or data from a server. jQuery is used to update the drop-down list according to previous choices.
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…
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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.
For online I don't think Borland, or whoever owned Delhi back then, really had the resources to keep up with everything else. Even today it's pretty expensive to buy the tooling from Embarcadero to keep projects alive, but probably cheaper and less risky that porting to another language.
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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..."
There is a free trial or a $100 personal use version or some such, at least there was, when I checked it out a while ago.
I'm still tempted...
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 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…
Indeed, if you attempt to look for modern windows/mac UI development tools it's either Visual Studio/C# or nothing. It's like development in that direction has ceased. Modern languages require complex tooling to get from zero to a UI, IE Rust/Go/Python, etc.
You are not tied to Visual Studio or Windows (as in, you can target Windows and Linux when using macOS, or Windows and macOS when using Linux).
Rust is generally anemic if you need a visual editor. Go and Python are in even worse state (there are no production-ready frameworks for Go to do cross-plat GUI app dev).
The biggest alternative so far is Flutter.
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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?
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…
As far as COM and ActiveX, though, the ability to package them side by side in the app install folder and describe them using XML (in the app manifest) rather than registry has been around since WinXP.