Marco Tech Blog

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.

posted by marcocantu @ 10:25AM | 9 Comments [0 Pending]

Matching Delphi High Standard 

Sorry Marco, it does not look to me a good post. 
That guy is looking for a free tool that can compete 
with Delphi (that is quite expensive). Although I 
believe too that Delphi is the best tool around for 
GUI development (and not only that), the comparisons 
made are pretty weak.
And let's say it: Delphi is great because VCL is 
Windows only. When they had to support Linux, CLX 
was not on a par. Portable native interface 
libraries are difficult, or we would have seen some 
great ones already.

Comment by Luigi D. Sandon on June 6, 11:00

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