Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Delphi still exists and is actively developed

embarcadero.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 250 posts

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#221

Post by mhuffman »

magicalhippo wrote: post #218
mhuffman wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Some concrete examples or resources would be much appreciated. Ok. I am not sure of your current front-end experience level, so I will give pointers as if you are not experienced with CSS grid, forgive me if this is incorrect. The key CSS items in this case would be: display: grid; ... which will allow for CSS grid layout, and then for the particular item you discussed, the following two CSS values would do the tric…

Ah excellent, thank you very much. Will definitely take another stab using this. I'm assuming the grids compose, so I can work on one group (say name-address set) and it'll be well behaved when added into a larger layout grid. The WYSIWYG drag and drop is nice, but if the results are predictable enough a manual "edit-and-run" cycle should suffice. > Of course these items would already be styled themselves to maintain…

>I'm assuming the grids compose, so I can work on one group (say name-address set) and it'll be well behaved when added into a larger layout grid.

Yes. That will work as expected.

>Here the labels and inputs in a and d, as well as b and e, should automatically line up vertically, including if say b's label changes due to a dynamic event.

This is where not rolling your own UI elements are faster. They will have been tested and any serious problems would have been addressed. But, even if you do roll your own, you can expect to be able to line up labels and fields both vertically and horizontally, even if the labels dynamically change (although watch for line wrapping if that is a possibility).

But, generally, your idea would work. I typically use flexbox unless I have a reason to use grid. For example if the entire flow of a page design changes between desktop and mobile, I normally use grid or if I need things consistently centered both vertically and horizontally, I use grid.

For laying out form UI elements, there are tons of examples that you can easily find online to fit the look and feel you are looking for.

If you have not settled on a stack yet, Svelte and Solid will offer the snappiness you are used to with desktop apps (due to no duplicate/virtual DOM). The drawback being that plugin elements are more readily available for more popular frameworks like React, however imho the plugins for Svelte or Solid tend to be better written.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#223

Post by magicalhippo »

rossmohax wrote: post #211
magicalhippo wrote: post #108

We use Delphi at work. We've gotten a lot of pressure from customers to move to the web. However the lack of ways to design non-trivial UIs quickly does not make it seen feasible at the moment. Then there's the fact that Win32 is like bedrock in terms of stability. We've got forms that's been designed and coded over 15 years ago which still works just as fine as they did back then. We've got input-heavy UIs, the one…

Did you need to do anything to support HiDPI displays in those 10+ years old forms?

It's mostly taken care of by the framework, though we have some breathing space due to our customers not jumping on HiDPI. It took some years for most of the kinks to be ironed out in the framework from what I gathered.

We've yet to receive a HiDPI bug report, but we do get reports when we forget some customers still run 800x600 screens...

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#224

Post by ehvatum »

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…

Really, yes. Use plain html, no CSS, no JavaScript, CGI implemented in some boring language, and plain http without ssl on the intranet and require vpn to connect from the outside.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#225

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

mycall wrote: post #201
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what "look great" means. And I've seen Delphi apps; I recently worked on one. In my experience they don't look great. Maybe you've done a lot of work to theme the controls; if so, wonderful. But what I'm familiar with just brought up Windows dialogs, and ... well, that's functional but I wouldn't say it looks great. But here are a few examples of ways you could create 150 fields in a day on a web app and h…

Beyond Compare is a lovely Delphi application.

Good to know. I use that; didn't know it was Delphi. It's...not terrible looking. It's all Windows controls, as I mentioned above, which makes it look, well, simple. And it's a utility that really doesn't need to look fancy, so it's fine for what it is. It doesn't seem to have a dark theme, which is a bummer, but otherwise it does the job.

But that doesn't mean I want to work on it.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#226

Post by LorenPechtel »

kaba0 wrote: post #122

Could someone please explain/describe how GUI creation was done with Delphi? I tried to look up a video/wiki page but I don’t see what kind of abstraction did it use and why was it as liked?

Drag and drop. Look at Visual Studio's handling of C#--and polish it. And note that I'm comparing a 15 year old version of Delphi against current VS--and I still favor the Delphi version.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#227

Post by LorenPechtel »

So what if it does?

In the old days I loved them. Then I found myself using older versions despite having newer ones because of important bugs.

Then came 64 bit code. They were years late in releasing a compiler that could produce 64 bit code and the reaction from the company seemed to be that it's a tiny portion of the users that need it.

Never mind that for that not-so-tiny portion (you might have no direct need of 64 bit address space but if you have to play nice with 64 bit code you have to be 64 bit--plugins) it was a total showstopper, companies relying on it were dead in the water, had to to a total rewrite or die.

I got the strong feeling that they were looking at us customers as a resource to be milked, not supported. My employer at the time died in the housing collapse, while I still have a couple of little Delphi apps around that I wrote I haven't touched it since then. C# was almost as good (and at this point all that's missing are arrays with an enum index and arrays that don't start at zero) and has much better support.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#228

Post by proxysna »

mikewarot wrote: post #4

I miss Delphi.... even though I've got it installed. I can't bring myself to use it. The "free" version has a hook in it that just doesn't sit well with me... they want a cut of any money I make with it, on their terms. It's easier for me to ignore it, and just put up with the limited documentation of Lazarus. I miss the days when I could afford Delphi.

Use Lazarus. Free and Opensource clone of Delphi

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#229

Post by arghwhat »

hasperdi wrote: post #183
arghwhat wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, nobody codes web apps like that. If they did they web probably wouldn't be that bad. Instead they whip out React and because native browser elements apparently are the devil they add tailwind/material design/bootstrap/whatever on top. Once you do it that way, the web approach honestly ends up as complex or worse than many of the alternatives...

That way doesn't scale well. Things become very messy and unmaintainable really quickly. This is how people code in the past, and there are good reasons why people moved on.

Code becomes unmaintainable when it was organized poorly and grows or if discipline was not maintained during growth.

React projects are just as susceptible to that, and "modern" web development is quite frankly a larger maintainability headache due to the dependency hell they bring.

Post reply on HN