Tech Republic: A developer's hands-on review of Delphi 2010
A few other tidbits from the review:
- "the good folks at Embarcadero came up with a brilliant idea called IDE Insight"
- "Another item that I really like is DataSnap, which is similar to WCF in concept, but in execution, it feels much smoother."
- "Delphi 2010 supports all sorts of new goodies, including multi-touch and gestures ... beating Visual Studio 2010 to market by nearly six months"
- "Delphi 2010 has good tools for debugging multithreaded applications, which is an increasingly important item"
- "If you want to do Windows development, and you want to work with native code in a native style, I think that Delphi 2010 is a very productive tool."
Finally, in the summary, Justin gives the Delphi team the ultimate developer compliment, "Every time I work with the Embarcadero team, I feel like they are writing the tools that they would love to use; they really are developers’ developers, and they understand the development process very well and implement it as tools quite nicely."
Read the complete review at http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/programming-and-development/?p=1924
Comments
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Wednesday, 18 November 2009He forgot to mention what is still *not* there: a 64 bit compiler. I don't know how a native Windows compiler can ignore 64 bit for so many years.
Delphi (or rather its product management) has a long history of pushing totally irrelevant ideas (Kylix?) while ignoring features that developers have been asking for years.
Now that Office 2010 is out (which comes in both 32 and 64 bit flavors), anybody who has an existing add-in written in Delphi is dead in the water. And Embarcadero does not seem to be concerned judging from the Delphi road map, which lists Mac support, but puts 64 bit at least a couple versions away.
Why would I even consider Delphi (which supposedly prides itself on being a premier native Windows compiler) if I cannot compile in 64 bits? -
Friday, 20 November 2009
@Dmitry
The idea to have a Delphi/CPP Builder available not only for the Windows platforms but also for the others like Linux/Mac etc. is a good one assuming they have enough resources and determination to do it.
However, I fully agree that first and foremost they need to provide the full support for the Windows platforms which these days must include 64 bit compiler.
The real mistake they made was IMO not Kylix but rather the idea of going after .Net which dragged a lot of resources and in the end resulted in the infamous Delphi 8 release.
I think it is still not too late for them to recognize their mistake in prioritizing multiplatform support above Windows 64-bit support for the next Delphi 2011 release, and I HOPE they are flexible and courageous enough to reshuffle priorities and resources while there is still time to do that.
In the end Mac OS is only about 4% of the PC desktop market and it is not existing as a server, so even assuming 100% adoption of the Delphi on Mac platform this is pretty much insignificant if compared to potential locses on the Windows platform due to lack of 64-bit toolset. -
Friday, 20 November 2009
@Zenon,
that's what baffles me too: I thought the idea for Embarcadero as a company is too make money first and foremost, and there is a lot more money to be made in offering a 64 bit version of Delphi. Even in the most current version (Delphi 2010), there is absolutely nothing that you can do end-product functionality wise that you cannot do in Delphi 7, which quite a few developers are happily using.
64 bit is very different: no amount of raw Windows API or third party components would let you create a 64 bit executable.
That means no shell extensions for Win 64, no Office 2010 64 bit COM add-ins, and no standalone executables that talk to Office 2010-64 through COM. -
Tuesday, 24 November 2009
It is beyond ridiculous that Embarcadero have not released a 64 bit version of Delphi yet. We're now getting daily requests from customers looking for a 64 bit compatible version of our product. What can we tell them? Nothing.
As Embarcadero don't appear to have any interest in releasing a 64 bit version of Delphi anytime soon (or even providing a schedule which they'll stick to), we don't have a choice but to start looking at using other programming languages for our tools.
Scratch any cross-platform talk until you've released a 64 bit compiler. -
Friday, 4 December 2009
About 64-bit support - that is a very high priority as well. Something they should perhaps concentrate more on rather than the Mac port.
But I do commend Embarcadero for developing Delphi for the Mac as well. This is something they should have done years ago. From a USP standpoint, it would really help to have a tool like Delphi which can compile natively for so many platforms. If Delphi can also work for iphone development, so much the better. Right now the only way of doing this (developing native compiled apps) would be to use C++ , which is ignificantly slower to develop in than Delphi. -
Friday, 25 June 2010
I'm commenting very late on this but I really must say that focusing on being the best native code tool for Windows 32/64 , an integrating all the other DB tools into the RAD studio fold would have been the way to go if I was making the decision. Windows still is 95%+ of thje desktop. Why go anywhere else at the moment?
Dont let down your existing loyal fans to go after new ones! The new ones might not be so loyal. by the time you come back, the loyal ones will be gone, too. -
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Now if you just could make the darn thing cheaper, I'd buy in heartbeat.
But those prices keep pushing me towards MS and FOSS.
Most other companies have "individual developer" licenses for around 3-500 Euros.
Still, Delphi is great. I wish we used it at our company.