Marco Tech Blog

June 1, 2006

Life after Borland (Allen Bauer on Bitwise Magazine)

A milestone article for understanding where DevCo could be heading... once it becomes a company.

posted by marcocantu @ 2:25AM | 5 Comments [0 Pending]

Delphi and Indy 

Among the open source projects used by Delphi, Indy 
is the worst. Slow moving, bugs left there for ages 
when a patch is available (to the extent Indy cannot 
open some email messages), components tested just on 
a few systems. Indy 9 is only barely mantained, but 
10 is still not "production ready" yet.

And what is worst, when someone signals these 
problems in the newsgroups is ignored or gets unkind 
replies. I decided to have Indy removed from all our 
applications - it's not a project we can rely on.

Comment by Kent Morwath on June 1, 13:29

Delphi and Indy 

Kent, from my personal experience I have to disagree.
I'm using Indy (mostly 8 and 9) in many projects,
including some of the core stuff that runs this blog,
and have never had big problems.

It is true taht they are terrible in backwards
compatibility (particularly at the low level) and that
Indy 10 does have troubles, which is one of the
reasons Delphi keeps including both 9 and 10 alongside.

Comment by Marco Cantù [http://www.marcocantu.com] on June 1, 23:38

Life after Borland (Allen Bauer on Bitwise Magazine) 

Marco, just two examples: the component to decode 
rfc822 messages fails with an "uneven size in decode 
stream" error with some mail messages in Indy 9.x. A 
simple patch has been submitted, and in my test 
without bad side effects. For unknown reasons, it 
was never applied to the code. It is not a "minor 
failure". It hinder messaga processing when 
the "wrong" message is received. We almost lose some 
customers due to it.
Another example is the IMAP4 component. At the end 
of 2003 we found out it was unable to work correctly 
with Exchange, due to some differences that did not 
break the RFC anyway. When we told them, we got the 
answer "the guy who wrote it had no Exchange server 
to test with". The code was too complex - or better -
 bad written - to be fixed easily, so we had to find 
better ways to do what we needed.
If it was a small one-man library found somewhere in 
the web I could have understood, but it was the 
TCP/IP library *sold* with Delphi! Probably low 
level components like sockets works well enough, but 
high level ones don't.
It's problem like those that had doomed Delphi in 
the past few years. The perceived value of the 
product greatly diminshed when the "new things" were 
just some third party library with quality issues.
I have a lot of respect for the JCL/JCVL guys, and 
the FastCode project. Whenever we had a buh with 
JCL/JVCL and posted it to their defect tracking 
system we got a prompt reply, and it was fixed 
quickly.

Comment by Kent Morwath on June 3, 00:33

The problem about Indy 

I kinda agree with Marco, Indy is a great idea and a
great project that is one of the main reasons we use
Delphi, but I think the thing is community. Every
succesful community project has grown rather slow and
safe, but it loses its magic when it seems to be over
controlled by some company or something else
lucrative. Indy has grown but it always seems to have
some problems that require knowledge beyond the
community wide one. And they (the team) seek for (of
course) the support services, books, help, etc. Some
people involved in the main project expect to take
economic advantage DIRECTLY from every issue, but
mostly, indy has still some community/enterprise magic
that give delphi some advantage.

Comment by Salvador Gomez Retamoza [] on June 4, 04:22

Life after Borland (Allen Bauer on Bitwise Magazine) 

 I am trying to install Indy 10 for delphi .net & send
an authenticated e mail message.I just could not even
install the source.When i asked for advice from Indy
expert team,it was not forthcoming at all & they asked
me to refer FAQ.
There is not even any help file which tells how to
install the Dev snap shot.
It is written in delphi but the installer is only
available for VS.More over the attitude of the Indy
team B members is the most indifferent compared to any
Borland news group.
I think Borland should buy out Indy & put its
resopurces behind it

Comment by Venkatesh [http://venksateshvt.com] on July 6, 17:12