June 6, 2006
Matching Delphi High Standard
A newsgroup post underlines that when you are used to Delphi (and the VCL), most of the other tools out there seem far from great, particularly in user interface development.
Warren Postma (don't know if this is a real name) made an interesting post in the non-tech Delphi newsgroup, titled " Delphi has ruined me. Ruined, I tell you, ruined." In short, he says that having used Delphi most of the other solutions for building UI applications (Java, Smalltalk, LISP, Visual C#, Python, Lazarus...) have weaknesses... so he is stuck with Delphi and Win32 only development when he'd like to have a cross-platform tool.
Although I don't agreee on all of the details, I often find myself in a similar position: Delphi is so nice that it is hard to start using another tool and feel fully satisfied... DevCo, are you hearing? Let's keep our fingers crossed and hope Delphi can go beyond Win32 and .NET.
9 Comments
Matching Delphi High Standard
As we know for ages now, Delphi is the best development tool. However being the best tool is not enough to make it out there. Problem is the trust people put in Borland to choose Delphi as their first choice. Managers don't want to invest in software development with a tool that might be deprecated some day. Disaster comes in when even Borland abandons Delphi. I hope when the spinoff is finished we will find a trusted brand on the box.Comment by TDaniel on June 6, 13:06
Matching Delphi High Standard
sorry but I think CLX was a mistake, a regular VCL over GTK/QT or something would have been much better at least you would use the same project for both, so what if all "Handles" return garbage.....Comment by Delphite on June 6, 13:37
Matching Delphi High Standard
"sorry but I think CLX was a mistake, a regular VCL over GTK/QT or something would have been much better" CLX *is* a VCL over QT. You can't take Windows VCL and make it work on another platform, or Borland would have made it already. VCL was designed with Windows in mind and for Windows. Beyond widgets appearance, internal working of GUIs may be, and often are, deeply different. Windows is message based, other OSes aren't. The widget set may be different, and even the way the users interact with the system. .NET was built upon the same APIs and probably made it easier, but Linux or MacOS are fairly different. If moving toward a multiplatform tool, DevCo may be faced with the choice of using the same library for all platform, but without excelling on none, or developing ad hoc libraries for each platform - a task that require a lot of resources and makes application less portable. I'd prefer the second path - I don't care to write and mantain different clients as long as they are very good and have a native look and feel - far better than a so-so interface with its own look and feel. If the application is properly partitioned, and the non-visual code is easily portable, the GUI is not the big issue.Comment by VCL and CLX on June 6, 15:47
Matching Delphi High Standard
Please take a look to Lazarus for an elegant solution of the multi-platform VCL paradigm.Comment by TDelphi on June 6, 17:05
Matching Delphi High Standard
For cross platform, why not try the Mono project? Its an open source .Net implementation for linux, bsd, apple, etc. I've run a few .Net winform apps without any changes on Linux with Mono. I bet you could do a Delphi.Net winform app, and run under Mono on Linux just fine. Or for the VCL lovers, theoretically you can take a win32 app, convert it to a VCL.Net app, and run on Linux under Mono as well.Comment by brad on June 6, 18:51
Matching Delphi High Standard
If ever I will choose a multiplatform solution, I'll make sure it has no dipendence from Microsoft :) MS and "multiplatform" are oxymorons. And anyway, I'd need a native solution - no cranky VMs between.Comment by Luigi D. Sandon on June 6, 21:48
Matching Delphi High Standard
I have to agree that Delphi has spoilt me. I have not found another tool that delivers what Delphi does. I have found some that have come close but invariably Delphi proves that it is still a much more complete solution. However, it isn't all roses. I still believe that Delphi only loses on one front: quality. Delphi 2006 is certainly better than Delphi 2005 but it isn't as stable as some competitors. Oh, and I guess there's that little thing called .NET 2.0. OK, so it isn't quite as complete as it could be. But hey, you can do everything without .NET in Delphi anyway. ;-) I'm looking forward to "DevCo" Delphi 2007! Here's to .NET 2.0 (with generics etc.) and better quality. Yes... I do like .NET. Cheers, Kevin.Comment by Kevin [] on June 8, 06:07
Matching Delphi High Standard
Same here. don't want a vm. If you want to use a VM, you can always use Java. Or Python. Or Ruby. Or a gazillion other tools. A VCL for X11 would be nice. Not Qt, WxWidgets or anything else in between.Comment by arni on June 9, 10:27
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Matching Delphi High Standard
Comment by Luigi D. Sandon on June 6, 11:00