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Delphi still exists and is actively developed

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Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#151

Post by vbezhenar »

saiya-jin wrote: post #114
alyandon wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the web pillow-smothered decent desktop UIs Application development has gone backwards so much compared to the RAD tooling from the 90s. I really can't even properly describe it to the younger generation. :(

ah the GUI designers from Borland, light years ahead of everything else... it just worked and looked nice (compared to Microsoft shitshow that was Visual Studio back then), was very easy to learn and its the only thing in software I've seen in 20 years which deserved the title RAD.

Delphi cut the corners with their fixed positioning. It will not work for web and it works very poorly for localization (labels change their lengths and can overlap over each other).

As soon as you introduce layouts to your UI, all the Delphi simplicity goes out of the window.

This is an interesting challenge to invent a way for UI to be pixel-fixed, yet work in web and with localization. If someone would do that, you could rebuild Delphi for web.

I guess one way is to build a pixel-fixed form for English language and let AI to build a layout for this form.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#152

Post by anthk »

auggierose wrote: post #129
magicalhippo wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you sure this cant be easily done? No, I'm no web expert. We've not found a way so far, and I've not seen something like this on the web, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong. edit: to clarify, I don't doubt one can get 150 fields in a view on the web. But can one dev do it in one day and have it look great?

If you pay me £30000 and give me 3 months, and work with me to determine how your current designs look like, and what your current workflow is, I can make a react based environment for you to do your designs in just as quickly. If you pay me £60000, I do it in 2 months.

Bind your react UI to GL 4.5, DirectX12 and/or Vulkan. Then try to call either the Win32 API, or POSIX.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#153

Post by pipeline_peak »

pipeline_peak wrote: post #28

You know a modern company is active when there’s a photo of a black lady with natural hair holding a laptop by a server room.

Cont'd : Then you walk into the Delphi office and it's just a bunch of Nordic academic guys with grey hair.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#154

Post by jaywalk »

mikewarot wrote: post #141
jaywalk wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know nothing about Delphi, but I guarantee that I could take any UI you designed in a day in Delphi and get something equivalent on the web in the same amount of time. Sticking a bunch of inputs on a page (even with some nesting) isn't complex at all. I think you are doing your customers a great disservice by not learning about web development.

Can you guarantee it'll run on the same machine, with the same browser, in 5 years, with no changes? Win32 is bedrock, the web is quicksand. Look at "HTTPS everywhere" and "you don't need FTP any more", which did little in terms of actual security, but broke almost everything in some small way. The web doesn't value legacy. It's a petulant 22 year old, that thinks it knows everything, and does stuff deliberately agai…

You are completely exaggerating the backwards-compatibility issues that web developers face. There are web applications I wrote 15 years ago that are still working today, in modern browsers, with zero changes. And I wasn't nearly experienced as I am today, and didn't even think about future-proofing anything.

Is the web as stable as Win32? No, of course it's not. But a page with 150 inputs isn't anything that requires cutting-edge web technologies. It'll work just as well today as it'll work in 5 years.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#156

Post by jamier1978 »

cosmotic wrote: post #24

I remember one of the great things about delphi was that it statically linked everything into the single .exe making it totally self contained. A Windows GUI program could be a couple hundred KB, no other DLLs required. C/C++ could do the same but you were stuck with nasty raw win32 calls and a lower level language.

Also the compiler was lightening fast.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#157

Post by noSyncCloud »

robocat wrote: post #149
robin_reala wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Side note, but can I introduce you to the element? You can just set its value instead of its innerText. It’s perfect for calculators. https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/form-elements.html#th...

Interesting. MDN link: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ou...

Not supported by IE so we can't use it :(

/s

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#158

Post by alyandon »

vbezhenar wrote: post #151
saiya-jin wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ah the GUI designers from Borland, light years ahead of everything else... it just worked and looked nice (compared to Microsoft shitshow that was Visual Studio back then), was very easy to learn and its the only thing in software I've seen in 20 years which deserved the title RAD.

Delphi cut the corners with their fixed positioning. It will not work for web and it works very poorly for localization (labels change their lengths and can overlap over each other). As soon as you introduce layouts to your UI, all the Delphi simplicity goes out of the window. This is an interesting challenge to invent a way for UI to be pixel-fixed, yet work in web and with localization. If someone would do that, yo…

We had things like expandable container groups for UI controls that could auto-resize the child controls as necessary to fit their content back in the 90s.

Granted, it wasn't as easy to set up properly vs modern web layout engines - but there is so much more to RAD applications than the UI layout by itself.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#159

Post by magicalhippo »

jaywalk wrote: post #132
magicalhippo wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you sure this cant be easily done? No, I'm no web expert. We've not found a way so far, and I've not seen something like this on the web, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong. edit: to clarify, I don't doubt one can get 150 fields in a view on the web. But can one dev do it in one day and have it look great?

I know nothing about Delphi, but I guarantee that I could take any UI you designed in a day in Delphi and get something equivalent on the web in the same amount of time. Sticking a bunch of inputs on a page (even with some nesting) isn't complex at all. I think you are doing your customers a great disservice by not learning about web development.

> I think you are doing your customers a great disservice by not learning about web development.

Sticking a bunch of inputs in a HTML page is indeed not complex, but it has to look decent (labels and corresponding inputs line up vertically etc) and be functional (ie with sensible tab order etc).

To get a sense of what we've got in Delphi, here's a demo video[1] illustrating making a simple input box. This is a "entry level" demo, but it's representative (though we don't use the runtime customization).

I'd really appreciate input on something which could allow us similar decent looking UI with similar effort on the web.

Like, note how "Last Name" lines up with "Product ID" below, even though they're in different groups. Things like that.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiKmYwB__YE

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#160

Post by ant6n »

auggierose wrote: post #129
magicalhippo wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you sure this cant be easily done? No, I'm no web expert. We've not found a way so far, and I've not seen something like this on the web, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong. edit: to clarify, I don't doubt one can get 150 fields in a view on the web. But can one dev do it in one day and have it look great?

If you pay me £30000 and give me 3 months, and work with me to determine how your current designs look like, and what your current workflow is, I can make a react based environment for you to do your designs in just as quickly. If you pay me £60000, I do it in 2 months.

I think a couple of Delphi licenses are cheaper.
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