Marco Tech Blog

April 16, 2009

Web Development Stacks... and Delphi

Two unrelated blog posts I read last week are turning my focus to Delphi web development strategies.

Two unrelated articles I read last week are turning my focus to Delphi web development strategies.

The first was a very interesting article on Artima Developer about "Twitter on Scala". This is actually a conversation with Steve Jenson, Alex Payne, and Robey Pointer by Bill Venners, which is both the Artima founder and a very strong backer of Scala. In the article Twitter developers discuss how they moved some of the site backend on Scala (while the core is built in Ruby) for performance and scalability reasons, among others. Very nice reading, I have to say. And Scala is certainly worth a look.

The second was a blog post by Dennis Gurock (author of DelphiFeeeds.com) titled "Choosing a Web Development Stack". The first article highlights the key requirements, while in the second he evaluates Java, Ruby on Rails, ASP.NET, and PHP... showing why he ended up picking PHP. A very nice summary of pros and cons of various technologies.

As I do most of my web development in Delphi, how would it fit in the overall picture? Right now Delphi lacks in cross-platform support (although you are reading a blog powered by a Delphi application running on Linux), web server integration, but most of all there isn't a robust framework geared towards web development. Over the last year or so I'm spent some time (too little?) elaborating on a Delphi framework based on easy deployment (which means, limited need to recompile the core engine), flexibility, speed, and more. My idea is to base it on a REST architecture, both for returning web pages and for returning data to Ajax calls (or stand-alone client applications).

I have many ideas and some code ready. So the plan would be to use this blog to layout the foundations and then, if there is enough consensus, start a project around it. The initial goal is to give away the server for free, with the option of making it open source as it gets a little more robust and complete. If no one cares, no big deal... I can move on to other work. By the way, some time ago I named the project DWARF, for Delphi Web Application Rest Framework.

posted by marcocantu @ 8:21PM | 17 Comments [0 Pending]

17 Comments

Web Development Stacks... and Delphi

...Maybe you are forgetting Intraweb? 
I understand all its limits, but also has a lot of 
good points.
My experience: with absolutely ZERO knowledge of web 
development (with zero I mean not even a basic 
knowledge of HTML!) I've developed with intraweb, as 
a first experience, a complete web order system for 
an apparel company. Gone in production with no 
problems at all (besides some problems with a 
dbexpress driver broken for multithreaded usage) has 
been used to collect all order for past season. For 
sure a graphic designer can improve it a lot, but 
from a user point of view I think is a very 
functional app....

Comment by Roberto Icardi on April 16, 20:31

Web Development Stacks... and Delphi

I wonder why Delphi developers don't use it for Web
Development. It has great frameworks like WebBroker
and IntraWeb, also open source like ExtPascal and PowTils.

Yesterday, for example I made a sample Apache 2.2
module to respond JSON requests to ExtJs tables. It's
amazingly simple, and fast, and you can benefit from
reusing your existing Delphi code.

The only thing I miss from PHP, Java and Python is
open source pre-build projects like Plone, Mambo,
Joonla, PhpBB, SMF, and others. Maybe nobody made this
because of the general thinking of Delphi as an old
development environment. 

I hope your post will encourage us to start creating
such frameworks.

Leonardo.

Comment by Leonardo [http://leonardorame.blogspot.com] on April 16, 21:07

Delphi is not a web development tool

One of the reasons that doomed Delphi in the past 
seven years was the several fruitless attempts to 
make it a "web development tool" because that was 
(is?) the fashion. All other aspects were sacrificed 
to the Web Moloch (and later .NET). The result is 
under everybody's eyes. 
Web developers and applications need different tools -
 web applications tend to be more dynamic than 
compiled ones, and a tool/framework/languages 
allowing fast changes and easy customization are 
surely winners.
That's why "scripting" languages got the stage. Who 
would code a web site in C++? That's Delphi realm, 
not the PHP/Python/Ruby one. Cram it there, and none 
would use it.
Maybe something alike PascalScript with a proper 
framework could work, but that wouldn't be Delphi.

Comment by Luigi D. Sandon on April 16, 22:26

Web Development Stacks... and Delphi

I completely agree, Delphi never quite made it to the 
web world. Even if they had lots of good ideas, timing 
differences with the (historically mainly 
database/desktop) Delphi developers, unfinished 
efforts (WebSnap) or lack of ressources (since about 
Delphi 8) or undiscovered gems (like the client side 
of InternetXpress) are the visible causes for this.

If you want to address to usual Delphi application 
developers, I think the server side should be REST 
(for service and AJAX) and Rails/MVC (for server-side 
rendering).

The hosting will be the most interesting, we could 
learn from asp.net and rails (mongrel) I think.

Anyway, it is interesting to see this starting and the 
buzz/community will gather.

Go, Marco! ;)

Comment by Marius Popescu [http://mapopescu.blogsome.com] on April 17, 00:00

Web Development Stacks... and Delphi

Hi there!

Some of us are waiting this from your presentation 
some time ago about a rest framework in Delphi.

Actually I'm using webbroker + json + jquery to make 
ajax applications and the productivity and quality of 
the work is very very good.

Go Fordward with DWARF

Comment by FrancisR on April 17, 00:49

Web Development Stacks... and Delphi

 I had used delphi(crosskylix)+webbroker+paxscript
created a pascal script page(PSP). very like php. and
used superobject+PSP to server Extjs json. it works
very good in windows and linux.

Go Fordward with DWARF

Comment by xalion on April 17, 07:06

Web Development Stacks... and Delphi

 Two things are definetly required: first -
cross-platform support, may be in cooperation with
FreePascal, second - the delphi part should be a
server application that easyly interfaces with ExtJS
or other JavaScript framework. IMHO, nowdays there is
no need for HTML rendering component at all.

Comment by Maxim Shiryaev [] on April 17, 08:52

Web Development Stacks... and Delphi

How would anyone host a Delphi DWARF/WebBroker REST
server?
- ISAPI
- CGI
- Apache module
- Windows service

Comment by Marius Popescu [http://mapopescu.blogsome.com] on April 17, 16:15

Web Development Stacks... and Delphi

You claim that Delphi lacks a Web Application
Development Framework.  Yet Atozed Software's own
description of IntraWeb states "IntraWeb is the unique
web application development framework for Delphi and
C++ Builder."  How do you reconcile that?

Anyway, we have been using IntraWeb for a number of
years now for Web Application Development and it has
worked great.  However, I am very interested to hear
more about DWARF.

Comment by Dean Millam on April 17, 18:54

Web Development Stacks... and Delphi

Hi Marco,

What's the foundation of your idea? An Isapi? a 
complete web server? any Other?

Comment by FrancisR on April 17, 21:13

Web Development Stacks... and Delphi

Could be interesting if you use Delphi only for what 
it's good for.
Webserver and database should be established standards 
(Apache maybe IIS. Db mysql, sqlite): don't write your 
own.
I would like to see database driven web, with a RESTfull 
interface applicable to multiple AJAX frameworks (flex, 
extjs, dojotoolkit etc...)
Most AJAX examples use some kind of ORM to access server 
objects. Why not browse 'any' database like a delphi 
data explorer

Comment by Rinie on April 20, 10:05

Web Development Stacks... and Delphi

If Embarcadero(CodeGear) revived WebBroker,
eliminating the one webmodule per application limit
and having nested web action levels, doing MVC would
be vanilla...

Andrea Raimondi

Comment by Andrea Raimondi on April 23, 17:41

Web Development Stacks... and Delphi

It would be awesome if something like web2py was ported 
to Delphi/FreePascal.

Right now, I'm choosing between web2py and Ruby on 
Rails.  I may give Intraweb a try to see if it runs OK 
under WINE.

Comment by Rich on June 19, 16:29

Web Development Stacks... and Delphi

Interesting - one year went buy. I would be interested 
if the opinons have stayed the same:-)

Comment by Michael Thuma on April 28, 21:48

Web Development Stacks... and Delphi

Intraweb can do the job just fine. There is another
reason why PHP and .NET win: Hosting providers. Delphi
is OK but who hosts your ISAPI modules without paying
big bucks?

Comment by nieuwlande on August 3, 21:24

Web Development Stacks... and Delphi

These days I think AJAX + RESTful is a good framework; But I do 
not know how to write Javascript to call RESTful interface.

So, I tested WebBroker, WebSnap and IntraWeb, and I found that 
WebBroker is very good for write some thing like CMS, just update 
template html file and use some CSS like bootstrap, you will get very 
beautiful web page.

Comment by James on April 2, 15:12

Web Development Stacks... and Delphi

 I love Delphi. so, any new project is welcome. 
I read all comments.
Nobody say something about TMS webcore . 
To use TWC and Intraweb mixed can be good idea.

Comment by Ramazan Geven [http://turkyaz.com] on May 2, 03:51

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