Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Borland Releases Delphi 7

Posted by timothy on from the delphi-and-kylix-sound-like-minivan-names dept.

sebmol writes: "Borland has released version 7 of its superb development tool Delphi. Unusual for Borland, they have added quite a few extras to their release such as a complete (!) copy of Kylix 3, Borland's port of Delphi to Linux. The price is somewhat affordable, especially if you can take advantage of their upgrade offers. For the first time since Borland became Borland again (after the Inprise debacle), I can say that I am truly impressed by this company and their products."

2 of 41 comments (clear)

  1. Does this have the Chess sample program... by Utopia · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ...that was included in Borland C++ and Turbo Pascal 7 and some previous version of Delphi ?
    Anyone knows ?

  2. Drip, drip, drip by Latent+Heat · · Score: 1, Interesting
    .NET is a lot of things to a lot of people, and for what I am interested in, it is a kind of super Visual Basic.

    Visual Basic allows the great unwashed masses to develop what passes for applications (the look-and-feel of a number of applications written in it suggests there is some merit in the Slashdot consensus that programming needs a steeper learning curve). But for Visual Basic to work, you have to learn a programming language with the consistency of the user interface to Word, and while you can develop components for Visual Basic in almost any language, you are the mercy of Visual Studio wizards to navigate the incredible Rube Goldberg that is COM.

    .NET/C# is to Java what Visual Basic is to Basic and what Delphi is to Object Pascal. Yeah, yeah, there is some IDE out there which probably allows the same thing in Java, but what makes .NET/C# not Java is the ability to have most of what Java is along with most of what Visual Basic is. Not only that, the .NET Visual Basic, C#, and thay bastard child of C++ (managed C++) are all interoperable, and you can develop widgets in C# or managed C++ and have them used in Visual Basic, all automagically transparent.

    I am interested in the market for widgets for data acquistion and signal processing, which for better or worse is on the Microsoft plantation anyway (Data Translation has dropped support for Mac or anything other than Windows), and if this .NET thing lives up to its promise, there is no reason to be tied to stuff like LabView.

    The drip, drip part is while Delphi 7 appears to be joining the .NET party, it is not clear to me how experimental/beta-test the .NET part is and if Delphi and COM is any guide, it may be Delphi 10 before Borland is done with dinking around with their .NET support to get it to their liking.

    The Borland press release is also so mired in buzzwords that I am also afraid that Delphi is becoming this hodge podge (lets see, there is VCL, and then there is CLX, which is pointedly not VCL, and beyond that there are these wizards for generating ActiveX controls, which you should be able to generate from any VCL control but I have never gotten to work just right with any of my VCL controls, and now there is Diesel/DCCIL, which introduces a whole raft of deprecations of your existing code base which was the whole reason for sticking with Delphi in the first place).