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Mastering Delphi 5 2025 Annotated Edition Is Now Complete

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Re: Mastering Delphi 5 2025 Annotated Edition Is Now Complete

#111

Post by int_19h »

bluedino wrote: post #47
Ao7bei3s wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Visual Basic could connect UI elements to data sources.

Re: Mastering Delphi 5 2025 Annotated Edition Is Now Complete

#112

Post by int_19h »

theamk wrote: post #34
Ao7bei3s wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Don't know about VB6, but at least Delphi had Align property and TPanel/TGroupBox. Together, it allowed to make apps that handle resizing just fine without any custom logic. (it has been a very long time, but I think those only handled internal composition and not overall window size.. so you'd still need some custom code if you wanted dialogs as compact as possible. But as long as you never missed setting Align prop…

It's actually not entirely correct with respect to VB6. It did indeed use absolute layouts, but unlike Delphi with its pixel units, in VB everything was measured in "twips" (1⁄1440 of inch, or 1⁄20 of point). This would then be converted to actual pixels based on the DPI setting of the system.

Re: Mastering Delphi 5 2025 Annotated Edition Is Now Complete

#113

Post by mixmastamyk »

switchbak wrote: post #74
mixmastamyk wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Layout managers were well established industry-wide by the 90s, which is where I started using them.

Absolutely - Qt had already figured out how to do layout before Swing was much of a thing (AWT doesn't count, yuck).

I suspected AWT had layout managers as well, so looked it up:

https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/awt/class-use...

Believe that was there from the beginning, mid 90s.

Re: Mastering Delphi 5 2025 Annotated Edition Is Now Complete

#114

Post by int_19h »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #109
lelanthran wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Lazarus is a good attempt to mimic Delphi, but it suffers from GUI jank. It uses the GTK GUI library, which in my experience is hard to get good performance out of. For example, when dragging things around it hitches and lags, instead of a smooth drag action. Another thing is the toolbar buttons are far too small for 2025. Maybe there's an option somewhere, but I couldn't find it. I also noticed that Lazarus has more…

Lazarus uses LCL, which has many backends, of which Gtk is but one. But you can also use e.g. the Qt version: https://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Qt5_Interface. On Windows, they have a native Win32 implementation of LCL, same as Delphi did in VCL.

Re: Mastering Delphi 5 2025 Annotated Edition Is Now Complete

#115

Post by baranul »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #109
lelanthran wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Lazarus is a good attempt to mimic Delphi, but it suffers from GUI jank. It uses the GTK GUI library, which in my experience is hard to get good performance out of. For example, when dragging things around it hitches and lags, instead of a smooth drag action. Another thing is the toolbar buttons are far too small for 2025. Maybe there's an option somewhere, but I couldn't find it. I also noticed that Lazarus has more…

Lazarus real problem, looks to be that they refused to embrace using it for mobile development. Which is odd. Almost as if Delphi's owner wouldn't allow it. Lazarus seems to handicap itself, for unknown reasons. They finally and kind of have an Android solution, from an independent contributor, but it doesn't blend so well with the desktop solution.

Re: Mastering Delphi 5 2025 Annotated Edition Is Now Complete

#116

Post by lelanthran »

baranul wrote: post #115
phendrenad2 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lazarus is a good attempt to mimic Delphi, but it suffers from GUI jank. It uses the GTK GUI library, which in my experience is hard to get good performance out of. For example, when dragging things around it hitches and lags, instead of a smooth drag action. Another thing is the toolbar buttons are far too small for 2025. Maybe there's an option somewhere, but I couldn't find it. I also noticed that Lazarus has more…

Lazarus real problem, looks to be that they refused to embrace using it for mobile development. Which is odd. Almost as if Delphi's owner wouldn't allow it. Lazarus seems to handicap itself, for unknown reasons. They finally and kind of have an Android solution, from an independent contributor, but it doesn't blend so well with the desktop solution.

> Lazarus real problem, looks to be that they refused to embrace using it for mobile development. Which is odd. Almost as if Delphi's owner wouldn't allow it. Lazarus seems to handicap itself, for unknown reasons. They finally and kind of have an Android solution, from an independent contributor, but it doesn't blend so well with the desktop solution.

I'd like to know more about this. Any links to the discussions? My google-fu is failing me right now.

Re: Mastering Delphi 5 2025 Annotated Edition Is Now Complete

#117

Post by kopirgan »

tomcam wrote: post #96
kopirgan wrote: post #81

Borland was really a pioneer, made great stuff.. Sad they couldn't survive the Microsoft onslaught both in terms of product and tactics.

It was mostly unforced errors. They tried to compete directly with Microsoft by buying word processors, databases, making a spreadsheet, etc. It was pretty clear to me even at the time. Microsoft, on the other hand, is severely underrated for its ability to just not fuck up too often.

Yes it's interesting how many just did that.. Lotus, Novell. But iirc there were also some bare knuckle stuff involving C++ which was supposedly vastly better than VC but not given the right support as OS vendor.

Re: Mastering Delphi 5 2025 Annotated Edition Is Now Complete

#118

Post by baranul »

lelanthran wrote: post #116
baranul wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lazarus real problem, looks to be that they refused to embrace using it for mobile development. Which is odd. Almost as if Delphi's owner wouldn't allow it. Lazarus seems to handicap itself, for unknown reasons. They finally and kind of have an Android solution, from an independent contributor, but it doesn't blend so well with the desktop solution.

> Lazarus real problem, looks to be that they refused to embrace using it for mobile development. Which is odd. Almost as if Delphi's owner wouldn't allow it. Lazarus seems to handicap itself, for unknown reasons. They finally and kind of have an Android solution, from an independent contributor, but it doesn't blend so well with the desktop solution. I'd like to know more about this. Any links to the discussions? My…

That Lazarus can be used for Android, comes from jmpessoa[1]. He is an independent, that's not part of the developer team. Users were asking and begging, for years, for a Lazarus solution to develop mobile apps (check the OS section of their forum). The developers basically ignored and refused. Their users are still begging for an iOS solution. Even though, the person who jmpessoa looks to have partially got the idea from to create LAMW (Lazarus Android Module Wizard), used it to create iOS components (but many years ago).

So, even though Android and iOS modules could be more thoroughly integrated into Lazarus or they putting forth an integrated LCL based solution, they're not. That's very weird. From the perspective of how much more useful Lazarus can be, and from their users asking for it.

[1] https://github.com/jmpessoa (LAMW)

Re: Mastering Delphi 5 2025 Annotated Edition Is Now Complete

#119

Post by jksmith »

lelanthran wrote: post #87
jksmith wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

MSFT Dynamics 365. It's a low/no code platform.

Re: Mastering Delphi 5 2025 Annotated Edition Is Now Complete

#120

Post by sheepscreek »

jcelerier wrote: post #72
sheepscreek wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t look at the language in isolation. Visual Basic was backed by the fantastic Visual Studio for development. That ecosystem was way more mature than Java ever got with Swing et al. IMO, if there’s one thing MS ever did right, it was how they nailed WYSIWYG GUI app development. Now they’re going backwards with the WinUI XAML crap.

> Now ... XAML Microsoft has been pushing XAML for long enough that it could drink, drive and vote in my country

The experience has become worse with WinUI 3. They got rid of the designer view. So now you're developing the UX code first. This is very unlike the prior paradigm, where you would typically drag and drop the components in your workspace/design view and then code the interactions. It is precisely what made Windows programming so accessible to the millions of developers. This is a step in the wrong direction IMO.
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