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TurboPower's Delphi Components Going Open
Luiz Bucci writes "According to the company web site, TurboPower Software announces their immediate withdrawal from the retail component and developer tools market. As part of the move, TurboPower announces its intention to release their award winning component libraries as open source to the maximum extent possible.
The resulting open source projects will be hosted on SourceForge." (SourceForge and Slashdot are both part of VA Software). TurboPower's libraries cover "compression, serial communication, faxing, Internet communication, scheduling, data entry, encryption, and XML manipulation."
It is worth trying, especially if you fumble around trying to create GUIs in MSVC. If you know what to look for, you can pick out apps written in Delphi pretty easily.
I used it primarily for about five years.
sh
"[A] high IQ is like a Jeep; you will still get stuck, just farther from help!" --Just d' FAQs, c.g.a
Well you can download a demo at Borlands website.
I learned MS C++, MFC programing before finding Delphi. Borlands IDE makes development quick an painless.
Delphi is most often used as a RAD tool for building frontends to databases, so you see it used A LOT in large companies for inhouse tools, but it is able to build any type of app or dll that you would want.
Many popular apps are also writen in Delphi but sometimes it takes a keen eye to pick them out.
HomeSite formerly by Alaire http://www.macromedia.com/software/homesite/
Motherboard Monitor http://mbm.livewiredev.com/
Inno Setup Installer http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php
To name a few that you may have heard of
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
A number of TurboPower's components (such as AsyncPro) are already available for Kylix. Also TurboPower were known for helping out Borland with Kylix, particularly by helping pioneer a number of components moving to Kylix.
Have you not heard of Kylix Open Edition? You can't be refusing to use it just because the compiler itself is not open source since you just said you use Delphi. Download it and give it a whirl. The new version lets you program in Object Pascal or C++.
Kylix 3 Open Edition free download
Given the way TurboPower ships most of it's components, I'd actually think this will not be much of a problem.
Pretty much when you bought a license of one of their components (such as AsyncPro), you got the source. One of my friends found a few bugs in AsyncPro, worked out how to fix them, and then alerted TurboPower about the bug and the fix. So the source has previously had a number of eyes outside of TurboPower actually reviewing it.
Plus (as I mention elsewhere) TurboPower have already got quite a number of their components working under Kylix, and seem pretty clueful on the whole. They seemed to have an attitude of "well, we need this, so let's write it ourselves!" rather than always resorting to high level API's or 3rd party modules.
GNU Pascal uses ISO Pascal syntax which is quite different than the Borland dialect. So convert the Turbo Power to GNU Pascal could be pretty involved. On the other hand, the Free Pascal has a Delphi compatible mode. So compile Turbo Power in Free Pascal should not be a big problem. The only question is how many of the components depends on VCL. The Free Pascal is still lacking anything equivalent to VCL.
There's historical precedent for gambling companies pushing the state of the art in computing. Some of the earliest work in commercial computers was funded by American Totalizator, the company that built racetrack betting systems.
It seems that - notwithstanding the release of Kylix - not so many people around here are familiar with the Delphi scene. A feature that has distinguished it from its Microsoft competitors is that it is very easy to write good object-oriented components for it. Partly because of this and partly because there is a good 'Delphi scene', for many years there have been large numbers of free Pascal libraries and componenets on the Web. You'll find many of them catalogued on sites like the Polish Delphi Super Page and the Russian Torry's Delphi Pages, as well as the inevitable SourceForge.
In this environment, all software houses that make Delphi components have struggled to make money. Only the very best have survived - who is going to pay money for a slightly dodgy replacement tree control when the slickest, fastest one available is an Open Source freebie?
TurboPower was originally the most innovative of companies, and even if it had lost its way a bit in recent times its passing as a Delphi component vendor is an occasion for regret. You'll find any number of free Delphi libraries for doing serial comms; I suspect that only TurboPower's includes a complete terminal emulator with its own scripting language, and only TurboPower's that includes a fully-fledged fax modem driver complete with all the very tedious stuff to encode and decode Fax TIFF files. All this conscientiously and beautifully documented. There are many other examples of excellence in TurboPower's large range.
I don't claim there is any reason why all this shouldn't have evolved in an Open Source environment. But AFAIK it hasn't. If the success of Delphi as a tool for Open Source development means that companies such as TurboPower can no longer survive, then I think long term all Delphi (and Kylix) programmers will be much the poorer for it.
It's strongly typed (not an advantage for evertone, though).
Delphi supports variants.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
I've always thought that delphi deserves more respect than it gets. I use it all the time to make DLLs that function as plug-ins for a video editing package written in C++.
The C++ IDE is also included with Delphi Studio 7 Professional. I have them both installed.
disclaimer: I'm a BIG Delphi Fan
.NET framework and C# language itself. .NET framework has many characteristics that Delphi developers already uses. That's why the move to .NET, for Delphi developers, is a easier step than it is for C++, VB or Java Developers.
After Delphi-2, M$ hired Delphi Chief Architect, Anders Hejlsberg (somewhat admitting Delphi was far superior). If, after that, VB has portions written in Delphi, I wouldn't be surprised.
It's important to remember that Hejlsberg is the man behind the
Pascal was strict. Borland broke the locks when they produced Turbo Pascal (20 years or so ago). They put in an ABSOLUTE directive that let you make variables share storage, so that you could interpret the same memory in different ways. They put in fast variable length strings. They put in a MOVE intstruction so that you could flop arbitrary bytes around wherever you wanted to. They put in raw access to ports and memory addresses and interrupts and all the low memory data in DOS. With these changes, programmers loved Turbo Pascal, and it sold a many times more copies than anything else for programmers had ever sold.