Delphi GUI Programming in 2021?
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Just stumbled upon this book and I'm shocked that it was just published in Nov. 2020. Maybe, Microsoft will release a new Petzold, Programming Windows 10, next. :rolleyes: Delphi GUI Programming with FireMonkey: Unleash the full potential of the FMX framework to build exciting cross-platform apps with Embarcadero Delphi[^] Are people out there still using Delphi? My company used the technology before 2000 and around 2005 started converting to .NET. We do have some old code in Delphi but most has been rewritten.
I am still actively developing/maintaining an existing Delphi/Oracle application with over 3m lines of code that is not economically viable to migrate onto newer platforms. Where possible new modules are being added using C#, usually ASP.NET or services but the core application remains Delphi. The biggest issue I have with Delphi is the lack of modern syntactic sugar, poor out of the box serialization support and difficulty finding code examples anywhere online these days. I agree it should definitely be considered a legacy language.
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CPallini wrote:
Personally, I can't stand Pascal syntax.
You can use C ++ instead of Delphi (or together with Delphi) because RAD Studio, which contains both Delphi and C ++ Builder, is able to do (almost) everything Delphi does (regarding supported platforms) and much more than Delphi if you keep I realize it has a C ++17 compiler that consumes many of the open-source libraries out there (including boost libraries).
Yes, I am aware of that. Your point is similar to the one of Member 15056742 above (however you provide more details). Unfortunately, in my experience, the related documentation is poor (MSDN is far better).
"In testa che avete, Signor di Ceprano?" -- Rigoletto
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05 WS-POINTER-VAR USAGE IS POINTER.
:-D
"I didn't mention the bats - he'd see them soon enough" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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Yes, I am aware of that. Your point is similar to the one of Member 15056742 above (however you provide more details). Unfortunately, in my experience, the related documentation is poor (MSDN is far better).
"In testa che avete, Signor di Ceprano?" -- Rigoletto
CPallini wrote:
Yes, I am aware of that. Your point is similar to the one of Member 15056742 above (however you provide more details). Unfortunately, in my experience, the related documentation is poor (MSDN is far better).
Yes, MS is a much larger company than EMB, so it can do a lot better in areas like documentation. Nonetheless, for teams or single developers, productivity is much higher than with MS tools. I don't want to be misunderstood, as I use VS Code a lot, but to have a complete product in a short time, with GUI, networking, complex algorithms, database at any level and which has a very low impact on resources and which has dependencies only on the operating system, Delphi and its cousin C ++ Builder have no equal.
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I am still actively developing/maintaining an existing Delphi/Oracle application with over 3m lines of code that is not economically viable to migrate onto newer platforms. Where possible new modules are being added using C#, usually ASP.NET or services but the core application remains Delphi. The biggest issue I have with Delphi is the lack of modern syntactic sugar, poor out of the box serialization support and difficulty finding code examples anywhere online these days. I agree it should definitely be considered a legacy language.
I am also actively developing things in Delphi and maintaining both large and small existing applications. For Desktop app development it is by far the most productive environment I know. Too sad that it is perceived as legacy, but then it seems that the whole concept of Desktop apps is becoming legacy - apparently running everything in a browser is the way to go these days. So in that respect WinForms and WPF is legacy too :rolleyes:.
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not true, there are still new projects started in Delphi today. Yes the number of users is much less then c# that is true, but as happend so often it's not always the best technology that makes it...
Delphi.7.Solutions wrote:
there are still new projects started in Delphi today.
nothing to write home to mother about, though. I have not seen active job placements, recruitments or hiring for Delphi positions in over 10 years in my area. I used to though, and that is part of my point. Delphi is dying, whether you agree with the world on that or not.
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Just stumbled upon this book and I'm shocked that it was just published in Nov. 2020. Maybe, Microsoft will release a new Petzold, Programming Windows 10, next. :rolleyes: Delphi GUI Programming with FireMonkey: Unleash the full potential of the FMX framework to build exciting cross-platform apps with Embarcadero Delphi[^] Are people out there still using Delphi? My company used the technology before 2000 and around 2005 started converting to .NET. We do have some old code in Delphi but most has been rewritten.
Our main application was written over many years in Delphi v5 (yes version 5). This is now being converted to WPF. We have the complication that the WPF .Net code has to integrate with Delphi and open in MDI windows within the main Delphi application. ;P Eventually all the Delphi screens and functionality will be rewritten and we will switch over to a complete .Net application. Still many screens to be done. :)
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Pascal is good. It's syntax is ugly, though.
"In testa che avete, Signor di Ceprano?" -- Rigoletto
May be ugly, but you never accidentally assigned something in an if condition. := All day long. The one thing I truly miss about Delphi.
I’ve given up trying to be calm. However, I am open to feeling slightly less agitated.
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Just stumbled upon this book and I'm shocked that it was just published in Nov. 2020. Maybe, Microsoft will release a new Petzold, Programming Windows 10, next. :rolleyes: Delphi GUI Programming with FireMonkey: Unleash the full potential of the FMX framework to build exciting cross-platform apps with Embarcadero Delphi[^] Are people out there still using Delphi? My company used the technology before 2000 and around 2005 started converting to .NET. We do have some old code in Delphi but most has been rewritten.
I still maintain some programs written in Delphi 5 ...
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Just stumbled upon this book and I'm shocked that it was just published in Nov. 2020. Maybe, Microsoft will release a new Petzold, Programming Windows 10, next. :rolleyes: Delphi GUI Programming with FireMonkey: Unleash the full potential of the FMX framework to build exciting cross-platform apps with Embarcadero Delphi[^] Are people out there still using Delphi? My company used the technology before 2000 and around 2005 started converting to .NET. We do have some old code in Delphi but most has been rewritten.
Funny, I just finished upgrading to Delphi Sydney (10.4)... It is still simply the best GUI development experience I've had. The remaining components are pretty rock solid. The Clients still enjoying the software. One product is literally 20 years old, just got a facelift! And about the book. FMX is the Alternate to VCL. It is cross platform, so it runs on android, MAC, iOS and windows... One set of controls... This is LITERALLY a 2021 topic, is it not? One code base, trying to hit every platform. And call MSFT Press, tell them Xamarin needs a book published :-)
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May be ugly, but you never accidentally assigned something in an if condition. := All day long. The one thing I truly miss about Delphi.
I’ve given up trying to be calm. However, I am open to feeling slightly less agitated.
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I am also actively developing things in Delphi and maintaining both large and small existing applications. For Desktop app development it is by far the most productive environment I know. Too sad that it is perceived as legacy, but then it seems that the whole concept of Desktop apps is becoming legacy - apparently running everything in a browser is the way to go these days. So in that respect WinForms and WPF is legacy too :rolleyes:.
Jan Holst Jensen2 wrote:
So in that respect WinForms and WPF is legacy too
I actually totally agree with that statement. Desktop development is now legacy. And, I actually understand it a bit too, since the desktop is now passe. I run Ubuntu 20.04 and only use Win10 through remote session/VMs to do work at job. THe only thing I cannot do on Ubuntu is...win10 desktop development (which we do at work). Not trying to be a Linux fanboy, just interesting. And, honestly Ubuntu uses less ram, runs less background processes that eat my processor, etc. Just lighter-weight than Win10.
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Assignment is the most used operator in procedural programming. Choosing a two characters sequence for assignment and just a single character for comparison is rather unfortunate.
"In testa che avete, Signor di Ceprano?" -- Rigoletto
Yeah, I really LOVE the JS approach of =, ==, ===, ==== (I hope I didn't miss a comparison, I forget which one means the left side is equal, in context, but not of type, against a mutated version of the Right Hand Side... LOL) The := jams me up when I switch between other languages, admittedly. But I will argue that the "." is the most used, as in
sVal := dsCustomer.FieldByName('Value').AsString;
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Funny, I just finished upgrading to Delphi Sydney (10.4)... It is still simply the best GUI development experience I've had. The remaining components are pretty rock solid. The Clients still enjoying the software. One product is literally 20 years old, just got a facelift! And about the book. FMX is the Alternate to VCL. It is cross platform, so it runs on android, MAC, iOS and windows... One set of controls... This is LITERALLY a 2021 topic, is it not? One code base, trying to hit every platform. And call MSFT Press, tell them Xamarin needs a book published :-)
Kirk 10389821 wrote:
And call MSFT Press, tell them Xamarin needs a book published
I think the reason they haven't published a Xamarin book yet, is because Xamarin is still not complete itself*. :rolleyes: *This was an intentional troll for all those (5 or less**) Xamarin devs out there **This was a secondary (and uncalled for) troll to the Xamarin devs.
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Yeah, I really LOVE the JS approach of =, ==, ===, ==== (I hope I didn't miss a comparison, I forget which one means the left side is equal, in context, but not of type, against a mutated version of the Right Hand Side... LOL) The := jams me up when I switch between other languages, admittedly. But I will argue that the "." is the most used, as in
sVal := dsCustomer.FieldByName('Value').AsString;
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Just stumbled upon this book and I'm shocked that it was just published in Nov. 2020. Maybe, Microsoft will release a new Petzold, Programming Windows 10, next. :rolleyes: Delphi GUI Programming with FireMonkey: Unleash the full potential of the FMX framework to build exciting cross-platform apps with Embarcadero Delphi[^] Are people out there still using Delphi? My company used the technology before 2000 and around 2005 started converting to .NET. We do have some old code in Delphi but most has been rewritten.
Powerful and fast programming but too expensive. Take a look at Lazarus...
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Jan Holst Jensen2 wrote:
So in that respect WinForms and WPF is legacy too
I actually totally agree with that statement. Desktop development is now legacy. And, I actually understand it a bit too, since the desktop is now passe. I run Ubuntu 20.04 and only use Win10 through remote session/VMs to do work at job. THe only thing I cannot do on Ubuntu is...win10 desktop development (which we do at work). Not trying to be a Linux fanboy, just interesting. And, honestly Ubuntu uses less ram, runs less background processes that eat my processor, etc. Just lighter-weight than Win10.
I also like Linux and use it quite a bit. When on Linux I use LibreOffice, GIMP, QtCreator, GEdit, Atril document viewer, SimpleScan ... and sometimes a browser. So mostly Desktop applications :^). But hey - I am over 50 so I am legacy myself :laugh: .
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Slacker007 wrote:
Delphi is primarily used still for legacy apps.
Yeah, that's what I thought too. That's definitely the situation where I work. Also, it is interesting to me, because the MFC was far better than Borland stuff (IMO), but you certainly are not going to see a new book released on developing with MFC. And there are a lot of MFC devs around. Maybe more than Delphi. Maybe not.
MFC was better than Borland OWL, by far. But not even close to Delphi. Delphi was VB done right (with component developers, users, and extenders all using the same tools/language), but too late to steal the market. Delphi was/is all the power of a full blown native language, with a lightning fast single pass compiler, inline assembler, and easy access to the entire Windows API. It has(had?) built in OLE compatible reference counting and interfaces for simple memory management (without the cost of garbage collection). I was the first person to ever ship a commercial application written (partially) in Delphi (I was at Borland at the time, and got special dispensation to ship using a pre-release version of Delphi, otherwise Delphi would have been the first). After leaving Borland, I used Delphi to build many commercial systems, and the productivity it brought to the team significantly outweighed the learning curve (I particularly appreciated that moving old C programmers to Delphi helped them to learn and write true Object Oriented code, which migrating to C++ would not have done). There are still things I like about Delphi better than .NET (like the way fields are modeled for SQL), but as I've been working for Microsoft for the last 15 years, I've come to appreciate a lot about .NET (Although I still have quite a bit of old Delphi code sitting on my home computer, I also have not been able to use Delphi for quite a while, so my experience is quite dated :-(). But I would certainly give it a good look if I left Microsoft and was looking for something cross platform (although .NET Core is doing a pretty good job in that space now from my limited viewpoint).
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Just stumbled upon this book and I'm shocked that it was just published in Nov. 2020. Maybe, Microsoft will release a new Petzold, Programming Windows 10, next. :rolleyes: Delphi GUI Programming with FireMonkey: Unleash the full potential of the FMX framework to build exciting cross-platform apps with Embarcadero Delphi[^] Are people out there still using Delphi? My company used the technology before 2000 and around 2005 started converting to .NET. We do have some old code in Delphi but most has been rewritten.
Pascal/Delphi is still very active; I get newsletters from Embarcadero frequently. Visiting the sites and forums associated with FreePascal and Delphi both entertain a pretty deep audience albeit not being incredibly large like Python/C/C++ user groups they're still active & sizeable. Delphi gets annual updates every time C++Builder does unless the update is a language specific bug fix or patch.
I was unaware of that...
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Just stumbled upon this book and I'm shocked that it was just published in Nov. 2020. Maybe, Microsoft will release a new Petzold, Programming Windows 10, next. :rolleyes: Delphi GUI Programming with FireMonkey: Unleash the full potential of the FMX framework to build exciting cross-platform apps with Embarcadero Delphi[^] Are people out there still using Delphi? My company used the technology before 2000 and around 2005 started converting to .NET. We do have some old code in Delphi but most has been rewritten.
