Delphi GUI Programming in 2021?
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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.
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%%%%%% %%%% = = %%C > \_)' \_( .' , \_\_/ |\_/\\ " \*. o /\` \\\_\\ \\/ %\`= '\_ . / ) \\/| .^',\*. , /' /- o/ - " % '\_ /\\\_/ < = , ^ ~ . )\_o|----'| .\` ' \_\_\_// (\_ - (\\ ///-( \\' \\\\"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony "Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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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 miss Delphi. I have many fond memories of it. I've been writing analysis code so long that I can't even remember what it was like programming in it, except that it isn't as painful as the languages I use now for analysis.
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For it's time, Pascal was pretty good - way better than the other "pointer based" language that was big at the time: Algol (C didn't come out until two years after Pascal, and took more years to gain real traction). Yes, COBOL had pointers, but ... X| The problem is that Pascal is nearly 50 years old, and really shows it's age when you compare it to modern languages, though it's been extended pretty well over the years. I don't use it - C# these days!
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony "Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
Some later versions of Algol (maybe W and 68R / 68S ?) could emulate pointers but they weren't a feature of 58 or 60. The nearest Algol-60 came to pointers were 'thunks' - functions passed as parameters, which 'modern' languages think that they invented. C is notorious for pointers. I found Pascal cumbersome - so many meanings of the word END. It's only useful feature was ATFs (anonymous tag fields). Admittedly, my experience of it was mostly porting the P-Code compiler and optimising its expression evaluators.
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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.
Why are you so surprised? Delphi was and still is IMHO the (one of the) best Windows development environment and programming languages. The only downside is that the current owners of it made it a pretty much enterprise level tool by raising the price to astronomic levels. Mainly because of that, beside an easier cross development between Windows, Linux and macOS, I switched years ago to FreePascal, with the Lazarus IDE (and library). Lazarus/FreePascal is mostly Delphi compatible and both are very viable tools for programming in Object Pascal...
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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.
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I have read online that the language is not dead, but dying. Delphi is losing more programmers than gaining. Delphi is primarily used still for legacy apps.
Kind of nonsense. It is neither dead nor dying, nor are only legacy apps developed in Delphi. Or Object Pascal in general (including FreePascal & Lazarus here)...
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For it's time, Pascal was pretty good - way better than the other "pointer based" language that was big at the time: Algol (C didn't come out until two years after Pascal, and took more years to gain real traction). Yes, COBOL had pointers, but ... X| The problem is that Pascal is nearly 50 years old, and really shows it's age when you compare it to modern languages, though it's been extended pretty well over the years. I don't use it - C# these days!
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony "Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
Well, you're answer shows that you haven't had a look at current Pascal for at least 30 years...
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Kind of nonsense. It is neither dead nor dying, nor are only legacy apps developed in Delphi. Or Object Pascal in general (including FreePascal & Lazarus here)...
Bitbeisser wrote:
Kind of nonsense.
:confused: Delphi Is Dying, TIOBE Index Insists[^] index | TIOBE - The Software Quality Company[^]
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Bitbeisser wrote:
Kind of nonsense.
:confused: Delphi Is Dying, TIOBE Index Insists[^] index | TIOBE - The Software Quality Company[^]
Well, not sure what is so confusing here. Just check the comments to the article you are linking to. TIOBE is utter nonsense by itself. Having nonsense like "Groovy" or even Objective-C ahead of it shows that rather clearly. The "popularity" is a rather hard to measure factor, specially when considering the real world rather than wishful thinking...
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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).
That's a great story and reminds me of a friend I worked with at a local computer shop back in 1992. He called Microsoft Office vapor-ware and always lauded the fantastic abilities of Borland Paradox (database that I'm sure you remember). He was right too. Borland had a better Office before Microsoft, but MS knew how to say, "but just wait, when we get there you going to see something...." Anyways, really great story and I believe you about it being better than VB. :thumbsup:
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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.
Yes, both Delphi 4 and Delphi 7. There are projects in both actively maintained and extended. On same machine, compilation speed washes away anything .net. IDE is much faster than VS. Coding style prefixing types with T makes code completion much faster, far less error-prone. VCL is much more thought out, than WinForms. You assign dialog return value to a button, not hunting buttons from the form's properties. Form description format (dfm) is much more version control system friendly. Grid customization painting (therefore scrolling) was far faster than in the C#/WinForms equivalent. Never ever a Delphi programmer missed an else branch. With these older releases, and falling inet packages REST and XML processing not as natural. Database access is a good mix of SQL and ISAM. With the "with" multi-object support, query is more language-integrated than anything MS came up, except Visual Foxpro (scatter/gather memvar and human grade dynamic compilation is hard to surpass).
