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PHP

Delphi For PHP Released 155

Posted by kdawson from the accelerator dept.
Gramie2 writes "Codegear (now a subsidiary of Borland) has just released version 1.0 of Delphi for PHP, a RAD development environment (running on Windows) that produces standard PHP code. It features a large set of built-in components, including ones that use AJAX for database access; and Codegear is encouraging users to develop their own components. The framework, VCL for PHP, is open source, and documentation follows the PHP model. Initial database connectivity is for MySQL and Interbase (Codegear's commercial database that spawned the open-source Firebird), but more are promised."
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Delphi For PHP Released More

Delphi For PHP Released

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  • Disambiguation (Score:5, Informative)

    by Zouden ( 232738 ) on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @06:57AM (#18513527)
    If you're as confused as I was, it's because the name Delphi can apply to the language Object Pascal [wikipedia.org], as well as for the IDE [wikipedia.org] used primarily for Object Pascal.

    This article is about the IDE being used for PHP, so fans of Pascal syntax have nothing to get excited about.
    • Oh I was confused back in the day. I was using borland pascal, pascal for windows, in addition to c++. They send me a marketing flyer for delphi hyped up as a new and unique language and offering me an upgrade of one of my current products, no mention whatsoever that it was pascal on it. I threw it away cause I had no idea it was pascal...later I figured it out (Their sales told me no new pascal would be offered but they had a new delphi product that replaced it)...by then I had moved on to c++ as the on

  • Borland has died after Borland Delphi 7 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by vivaoporto ( 1064484 ) on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @07:04AM (#18513581)
    When Borland (then Inprise, then Borland again, then Codegear(?) ) stopped making sober RADs and decided to take a chance on expensive toys for code management, they lost in both fronts. The Turbo Series (Pascal, C and Assembler) and Delphi (the odd versions, 1, 3, 5 and 7) seriously competed against Microsoft products (Microsoft C, Assembler, Visual Series), even outselling them in a lot of places in the world (Brazil, for instance).

    Two things made Borland wreck their scene: 1) losing their creative minds to Microsoft, specially Anders Hejlsberg [wikipedia.org], creator of nothing less than Turbo Pascal, Delphi and main architect of C#. 2) losing their focus (from useful RADs to expensive but totally good for nothing "Application Lifecycle Management" (whatever it is).

    Had kept the focus and the creative minds, either .Net would not exist (and consequently, stole Borland's thunder) or the Borland tools would be better even than the Microsoft ones on that fronts (Delphi 8 almost got there, initially). Borland died a sad death, and what we see now is nothing but Post Morten flatulence.
    • I agree your first point,but if you cant hang on to your top people then serves you right. What really killed Borland though was their pricing structure with their no updates, everything is fixed in the next release which you pay nearly full whack for and IBM releasing Eclipse which was intended to destroy Borlands main revenue source in the emerging J2EE market at the time.

    • Re:Borland has died after Borland Delphi 7 (Score:4, Informative)

      by pdawson ( 89236 ) on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @07:40AM (#18513843)
      They sorta realized this. CodeGear is all the development apps (Delphi, C++, C#, Java, etc.) spun out to a new company. Borland is still around, and they're keeping the code management crap for themselves.
    • Had kept the focus and the creative minds, either .Net would not exist (and consequently, stole Borland's thunder) or the Borland tools would be better even than the Microsoft ones on that fronts (Delphi 8 almost got there, initially).

            Which is why Microsoft did what they did. They have always done this to their competition, just add it to the long list.

        rd

    • Re:Borland has died after Borland Delphi 7 (Score:4, Interesting)

      by osgeek ( 239988 ) on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @09:59AM (#18515569) Homepage Journal
      I'll take it a step further. Borland/Inprise/whatever is such a fucked up piece of shit company that I'd never knowingly start a serious project that depends upon them or their products in any way.

      My team has suffered from blistering crotch fires of agony trying to cope with C++ Builder's (5 & 6) linker woes. Rather than spending our valuable development time on important-for-our-customers product development issues, the very existence of our company became reliant upon working around our inability to even link our growing application.

      It was a horrible mess, and one that Borland was useless in helping us to resolve because they were off working on new products that never saw the light of day.

      Never *ever* again.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Bozdune ( 68800 )
        ...blistering crotch fires of agony...

        Thank you, that's one to file away in the "useful phrases" department. I like it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by birder ( 61402 )
      Yeah, they died (I'd say after Delphi 6 which I still use today) but Developer Studio 2006 is an impressive product for Borland friendly programmers.

  • Oh, great (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Corporate Troll ( 537873 ) on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @07:10AM (#18513625) Homepage Journal

    Writing insecure web applications in less time. Thanks Borland! ;-)

  • Another desperate attempt. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Yuioup ( 452151 ) on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @07:10AM (#18513629)
    Another desperate attempt by Borland/Codegear to appease their dwindling developer community.

    Delphi is dead. Nothing to see here. Move along.

    Y

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by dunkelfalke ( 91624 )
      no, no, it's resting.

      now serious: delphi is still the best tool for developing win32 apps and it is still widely used in europe.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Yuioup ( 452151 )
        Agreed. Delphi 7 rocks.

        Yours truly,

        A disgruntled Delphi 8 purchaser.

        Y
        • Delphi six is the best release of the IDE so far as I'm concerned.

          all these years and it's still my preferred instance of delphi.
    • Meh. People have been telling us Delphi is dead longer than they've been saying that about Macs. We'll believe it when we see it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by davek ( 18465 )
      forgetaboutit. Borland made one of the first C compilers, has expanded software development since the beginning, and has no intention of quitting the development game any time soon. Sure, it seems to have its head up its ass with a lot of things (ditching Kylix seems to be one), but the fact remains that there will always be a need for an alternative to MS Visual Studio for IDEs. If Borland were smart, they'd play their advantage: not being locked in to windows.

      Delphi is still a solution in search of a p

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Afecks ( 899057 )
      I use Delphi 6 and have done so since it was released. It even works in Vista. I really don't see it being dead as much as it is starting to get a little long in the tooth. I dare not switch to Delphi 7 or later because some projects simply will not build properly and it scolds you for using pointers. Other than that Delphi works a charm. Most components still support Delphi 6 including Indy.
      • You just need to Project Options, Compiler Messages tab and uncheck Platform Symbols along with the group of Unsafe blah-blah warnings at the end of the list. This gets rid of the stupid scoldings about Windows API specific (that is the whole fine point of Delphi code) warnings.

        If you are using Delphi to build ActiveX controls out of VCL controls, you get these stupid [Warning] TF32Ax_TLB.pas(2390): Method 'InitiateAction' hides virtual method of base type 'TControl' messages that I never figures off how

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Afecks ( 899057 )
          I have the free personal version. Any ideas where to get patches for that? Borland's site is a maze, especially now that they've branched into CodeGear.
          • You can start with http://info.borland.com/devsupport/delphi/ [borland.com], and I tried the Delphi 6 Update Fixes link, and I attempted login for registered user of Delphi 6 (they e-mailed me my password based on my e-mail), and I got a broken link. Maybe that is why there is so much Slashdot hostility to Borland/Codegear/whatever.

            The files are D6_Upd2_Pro.exe, D6_RTL2_Pro.exe if you have the Professional version, some other name than Pro if you have the Personal Edition. I have seen sites referencing both the Pro a

  • I am a long time Zend user, and I really like ZDE -- especially because it is cross platform (Linux, OSX, and Windows).

    Delphi for PHP looks to be very similar (I read the announcement, but have not tested the app yet), but also has a database browser! This is particularly valuable, and truly DOES speed up development.

    I will have to blow the dust of my Windows box, and try this out. :)
  • If webdevs do something Windows they use ASP (ASP.NET). ASP.NET is already RAD-like, the niche is taken.
    If they offer tools for PHP and MySQL target servers run Linux, target developers run Linux, and they are missing again.
    • Actually I think you'd be surprised how much PHP development is done within Windows and later pushed to a Linux server. In fact, where I work (federal government), PHP development and deployment is done exclusively on Windows. So I don't think this product is off-base. Besides, I'm thinking the Windows crowd is more inclined to purchase an IDE than the Linux folks.
    • I program PHP on a Windows client (In Dreamweaver) & send it up to Linux servers. As a long-time Delphi programmer this is absolutely what I want installed on my Windows PC.
  • I'd love to give it a try, but it requires a login for download, and there's no "Forgot your password?" option.

    (And yes, I have a whole bunch of other email addresses I could use. That's not the point.)

  • Let's hope you're evaluating REAL REAL fast (Score:4, Funny)

    by suv4x4 ( 956391 ) on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @08:19AM (#18514203)
    ... because CodeGear offer this trial on their web site:

    "Free, fully functional 1 day trial"

    Right, 1 day.
    Great.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Gramie2 ( 411713 )
      As one of the CodeGear people explained, it was intended to be part of some kind of 1-day on-line seminar. The seminar had to be cancelled, but they decided to make the demo available. They realize that a single day is "sub-optimal".

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by suv4x4 ( 956391 )
        As one of the CodeGear people explained, it was intended to be part of some kind of 1-day on-line seminar. The seminar had to be cancelled, but they decided to make the demo available. They realize that a single day is "sub-optimal".

        PR is hard. Basically if the CEO's About page needs a photo but lacks one, which do you think is the better option, PR-wise:

        1. Use the only photo of the CEO available, where he has his pants down.

        2. Wait a bit and make/provide a better photo.

        Unless they plan to assign a CodeGear

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Old Wolf ( 56093 )
          Not only is it 1 day, but the activation is ridiculously complicated (activation.. of my trial.. by basically putting files in my documents and settings/[user] folder)

          If you can't manage to put a file in a folder then I'm glad you aren't going to be developing applications that I might have to use one day!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Suidae ( 162977 )
      This is why microsoft/vmware provide free virtual machine software.

      I use Microsoft VPC with a Win2k image. Install SVN and connect to a repository on the network, set up a startup script to set the time system date to Jan 1st then save and backup the VHD. Adjust the settings file to disable time syncing. When you want to evaluate software, copy (or inherit from) the image. Turn on 'undo disks' and you have the option to discard all changes made during the run.

      I call the image 'Groundhog day'.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by suv4x4 ( 956391 )
        This is why microsoft/vmware provide free virtual machine software.

        That's like me ranting "BluRay's DRM sucks" and you telling me "this is why hackers provide hacks".

        It doesn't make Sony/Toshiba any better for feeding us rogue DRM. Of course I installed it on VMWare, otherwise...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by nuzak ( 959558 )
        > I call the image 'Groundhog day'.

        Shouldn't you set the date to Feb 2 then? Besides, most stuff with expiration these days phones home and won't run if it can't. Pretty hard to fool that.
  • Ok I'll bite, might have some karma to burn. Isn't Delphi Dead? My first task at the job I have now was to port some Windows Delphi code to linux. At first I thought, no sweat I can use Kylix. In the end I came to the conclusion Delphi is dead on any platform and ended up rewriting it in C. I guess it could still have life for legacy applications, but in this rapid multi-flavored world if a language is 100% stuck on 1 platform/OS it's more or less dead (excluding of course assembly which of course is arch

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Darkstorm ( 6880 )
      Hmm, you know, I am making a decent living using delphi. Is delphi dead? Pretty much, but since windows does occupy a vast majority of pc's out there (fact, not fiction), I will have to disagree with your concept that any language that is not multi-platform as dead. Maybe one day when linux becomes more user friendly, and people stop screaming "look at the source" as a replacement for documentation and simple to use interfaces, maybe your statement might be true. There are far too many idiots in the wor
      • That's good. Honestly I liked Delphi. I downloaded the 180day evaluation version of the suites so I could look/compile/test code while porting to C. The IDE is beautiful, I'm sad Kylix didnt make it because it would have been a nice easy way to make X applications without having to know xlib.
    • Apparently, you've never heard of the Free Pascal Compiler [freepascal.org] or the accompanying RAD IDE Lazarus [freepascal.org].
      • Aye I have and they're not 100% Delphi compatible, haven't tried Lazarus though. The problem with using fpc for Delphi code (besides incompatibilities) is that it doesnt support Forms. If you're doing cli only stuff it seems to work ok. But if you have a GUI you're kinda screwed.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Halo1 ( 136547 )
          The Free Pascal Compiler is indeed only about the non-GUI stuff. All the GUI stuff (including the forms unit) is handled by the Lazarus [freepascal.org] team.

    • Re:Delphi Dead? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Ronin Developer ( 67677 ) on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @09:30AM (#18515121)
      Is Delphi Dead?

      First, you have to define what you mean by Delphi. I code using Delphi 5 & 7 (i.e. Delphi's flavor IDE and Object Pascal) every day. With the number of controls available and the knowledge of being able to create my own visual and non-visual controls, this tool allows the company I work for to remain well ahead of our competitors by at least a year ( they copy our features ).

      However, Delphi is no longer just the language - it is now a family of IDEs for many different programming languages that have adopted the same advanced IDE and concepts of the original Delphi product.

      Is Delphi dead? Well, try to find competent Delphi developers and you'd be suprised. It's probably easier to find older Delphi developers who know the environment very well than to find younger developers versed in it. If you need a Delphi developer, be prepared to pay them well as they are a rare commidity indeed. And, like any developer for any tool/language, their quality and skills vary.

      Has Borland/CodeGear blown it? Perhaps. The definitely pissed me off when they raised the price of their tools well out reach of the small developer. They did that when Phillip Kahn built that palace in Scottsdale. Then, they moved to this application lifestyle BS and, essentially, abandoned their core customers. WTF were they thinking? Then, they blew it with Kylix - they didn't fully develop it and keep the costs down to make it easy to adopt. Then, they dropped it like a hot potato. I haven't upgraded my products since then - I certainly wouldn't be able to afford them (the Enterprise and Architect versions) on my own.

      Is $249 or $299 too much to pay for Delphi for PHP? Maybe. They will have to show the community that it's worth spending the big bugs over some other IDEs (free and commercial). Will I play with Delphi for PHP? Probably - if they make a trial version that isn't limited (like the Turbo Explorer products are) and actually be able to create my own components and such. And, it sure as hell better be able to talk to Firebird, MySQL and Oracle and not just Interbase - Yes, I like Firebird.

      So, is Delphi dead? Let's say that I am retraining myself for C++, C# and probably Java development in the event that I need to change jobs. But, I will continue to use Delphi as it enables me to put food on the table and pay the bills. And, I like it.

      RD

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by suv4x4 ( 956391 )
        You know you're pretty good at asking yourself tons of questions and answering right away. You're probably never lonely.

        For the record, a dead language is never THAT dead that everyone suddenly drops it. Fortran, Lisp -> they are still used in lots of projects out there but they're pretty much all dead.

        In fact, you can argue PHP is starting to die this year, but it still has a majority as a server side technology on the web - it's simply not as simple as saying "is it dead? I use it, but I'm ready to jum
  • All well and good, till they kill the product like they did with Kylix...then what, yep you are left holding the bag....thanks, but no thanks..
  • Funny how just yesterday I was digging through my binders in search of my Delphi discs to code up a quick file management util. I'm eagerly waiting for the trial version of Delphi PHP to finish downloading, but if it's anything like Delphi/BCB I'm going to need more kleenex. Say what you will, but when it comes to rapid prototyping it's about as fast as it gets. There's a certain elegance to ObjectPascal despite its simplicity, and it can do just about anything C++ can, with less headaches. I see it as

  • Your app on Delphi (Score:3, Interesting)

    by suv4x4 ( 956391 ) on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @09:05AM (#18514801)
    This is your app on Delphi (TM):

    I installed the trial Delphi for PHP and created an app which prints "Hello World" on the screen.

    For a reference, this is how this looks in plain PHP (granted no MVC and so on, but for the sake of example..):

    &lt?php echo "Hello World" ?>

    What does Delphi do?

    1. Loads several thousand lines VCL code
    2. Loads all the menu, form, container and "external" controls, although they're not used (thousands of lines of code)
    3. The Hello World is a label (no simpler way) which has around 50 properties (color, bg color and what not) defined in an XML file. I left all at defaults, but never mind. The file is loaded, parsed.
    4. The Label class inherits from CustomLabel, which inherits from Components which inherits from other stuff I didn't even bother check, it goes through all properties, and figures out after a lot of thinking that it should print the words "Hello World".


    Keep in mind I simplified it so you stay with me. There's also a bunch of other stuff happening, application classes and what not.

    And again, this is how it's done in plain PHP:

    &lt?php echo "Hello World" ?>

    This Delphi stuff is really promising I tell you. Or, rather, it's supposed to look promising when Borland pitches CodeGear for sale again. Don't forget, CodeGear was spun off so that it's income is more clearly defined, and it's a more lucrative sale. Borland doesn't care of CodeGear has a future, it only wants to make it LOOK as if it has a future, and this project is sadly nothing more than this.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ajs318 ( 655362 )
      Well, this is what happens when you use an authoring package of any kind. It's a pretty much unavoidable consequence of using a tool to do a job for which it was not designed. That's the difference between a calligrapher and an idiot with a stencil.

      It's obvious when a web page was made using Dreamweaver, because you'll get things like <font> tags around spaces and sometimes nested <font> tags rather than declaring the colour, size and typeface in one {or, preferably, doing it properly with

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Shados ( 741919 )
        You're right, but last I checked, newer versions of Dreamweaver used CSS by default (heck, even Microsoft Expression does) and automatically remove or merge pointless nested tags, on top of having a bunch of analysis tools to clean up code. If someone knows how to use Dreamweaver, you'll be hard pressed to tell that they used it, except maybe for the dead giveaways in the auto-generated javascript snippets...

        I didn't use Dreamweaver in a long time, but heck, Expression (and Im fairly sure Visual Studio Orca

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by suv4x4 ( 956391 )
        Well, this is what happens when you use an authoring package of any kind. It's a pretty much unavoidable consequence of using a tool to do a job for which it was not designed. That's the difference between a calligrapher and an idiot with a stencil.

        Actually this is the difference between embracing the capabilities of the platform you're targeting, and blindly porting abstract concepts from one to another and expect good performance.

        Guess which of those two examples Delphi for PHP is.

        I mentioned in another p
  • I like Delphi a lot. It takes a lot of the GUI developing stuff out of your hands, etc. But I don't see this same development method working for PHP.
    Simply because they use the same "application" aproach that Delphi had. But PHP, or at least webapplications, are not really persistent. Every time you need to save and restore your application session, and for good performance you want to keep this as minimal as possible. When everytime the "program" has to do something you need to restore the "application" it
  • I think this is pretty interesting. I'm running Delphi 7 Enterprise at my office... downgraded from 2005 because it sucked all kinds of ass. I recommend Delphi to anyone who wants an easy RAD that is powerful as well. Delphibasics.co.uk is a good place to get your language basics out of the way.

  • mod me 'luddite' (Score:5, Insightful)

    by steveoc ( 2661 ) on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @09:47AM (#18515399)
    Please mod me down as an old fashioned technology-phobic luddite .....

    But I read TFA, and viewed the demo vid, and I cringed.

    Maybe Im getting old, but Im perfectly content writing my PHP code in vim, and trusting that my template/rendering classes that I rely on will automatically look after the 'drawing of the screens' part of the application, in an efficient manner.

    Im happy just writing code that twiddles attributes, performs calculations, and calls SQL. The only 'visualisation' that happens during coding time happens in my head. If you need to pull in the description of an SQL table at coding time - just :!! out to a shellscript that generates a template given a table name. Its not rocket science.

    The mental state of mind that you need to be immersed in whilst coding is very different to the state you need to be in when testing, or viewing the result from an aesthetic POV. Coding belongs in a text editor, and anything else is a distraction.

    Even Ajax - Im perfectly content coding that longhand. Its only a few pitiful javascript functions after all, and I dont see the need to wrap them in a framework. Lets not go around pretending that because we are using AJAX, that we are super-coders on the cutting edge of technology .. its just a few javascript functions and a bit of PHP on the receiving end. You should be able to code that in your lunch break.

    OK, so my vim/PHP environment might put me back in the dark prehistoric stone ages, but at least I can sleep well at night knowing that none of my webby code is dependent on the fate of a 3rd party commercial product. After all - thats the main reason I use FOSS in the first place. The whole world wide economy can collapse in a radioactive heap tomorrow, and it wont affect my development at all.

    And surely to goodness, isnt vanilla PHP with the standard libraries already way high level enough ? What sort of sheer sloth and laziness leads one to think that they need to front-end PHP with something even higher level ? Are we evolving into a race of Jabba-the-hut's, or what ?

    Anyone that commits the blasphemy of 'developing an application' using mostly mouse-clicks honestly needs to be placed into a jar of isopropyl alcohol, and donated to medical science - it is just plain wrong, and always has been.

    I tend to take the machine's side of the argument anyway - the less code the machine has to munch through in order to come up with any given result, the happier I am. The end result is just pixels on a screen when you think about it, and a lot of frameworks just add more and more layers of code munching for the machine to produce those same pixels and same behaviour. Silly - just keep it light, simple, scalable and avoid dependencies on proprietary products.

    Whats so hard about that ?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by davek ( 18465 )
      Here Here! Great post.

      Anyone who relies on an IDE to do programming, in fact, not a programmer. Maybe, someday in the distant future, visual tools will have evolved to the point of being all-powerful, but I don't think that will ever happen. It goes back to the same basic argument (and the fundamental flaw in all microsoft designs, but that's another story): if you want to communicate something, you talk!

      VIM (or *cough* emacs) is to programming as the command line is to data processing. Without these to

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ajs318 ( 655362 )
      You're talking dangerously like an old-skool hacker there. Next thing, you'll be shaving off a few CPU cycles by omitting extraneous whitespace in text files. I bet you do a bit of electronics or plumbing or something constructive with your hands when you're not using a computer.

      Things like this aren't meant to appeal to our sort (I bet you knew what the "logs of sines" and similar obscure tables were used for), but to those pointy-haired types who believe management is a transferrable skill, essentia
  • This thread brings up the usual "Delphi is dead" or "well, that about does it for Delphi" type comments. As I posted before, Delphi developers have been hearing that for almost a decade. The very fact that it's not dead should tell you something.

    The thing about Delphi is that it has ALWAYS been a niche product. Ever since MS started really pushing their coding tools and the other code tool creators started dropping, Delphi has been stuck in a box. But the very fact that it HAS still survived should show
  • First of all: All Delphi bashers please shut up. We know Delphi and the IDE concepts it represents are 15 years old but nevertheless it is a neat tool. Some of the best developers I know still like to use it. And if you don't remember the time when Borland jBuilder and it's other IDEs where like 10 years ahead of the rest then you're not qualified to rant. End of story. Thank you.

    On Delphi for PHP:
    I watched the Screencasts (by some indish guy with a heavy accent). The features are cool and developing stuff

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