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Delphi For PHP Released
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."
If you're as confused as I was, it's because the name Delphi can apply to the language Object Pascal, as well as for the IDE 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.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
The embedding code in HTML part of PHP is fairly legacy really for anyone doing anything more complex than basic scripts. Any decent larger PHP app will only use that method as part of a templating/view layer (as long as there's no business logic involved it's a useful templating tool), if at all.
Our CMS is MVC (command and controller j2ee pattern specifically), using PHP's embedding in the views only, is fully OO and has an O/RM layer for datastore access. This kind of set-up is increasingly common in PHP now. Just look at the number of application and database frameworks available for it.
Of course there are always going to be kids knocking out horrible scripts, but that doesn't mean there aren't people doing things properly too.
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.
No kidding? Have you ever seen a quality application written in PHP- it can do all these things and more. I've written many quality PHP applications that use a modified MVC architecture and has all the PHP code separate from the output templates.On top of that it uses OO where it makes sense to do so, it's fast and secure.
.net, java).
As a PHP developer, I agree with everything you said, except "fast", unless:
1. we ignore the speed of all the other platforms out there (python, perl,
2. your requirements of "fast" are modest.
Truth is with more complex architectures and lots of OOP, PHP is really slow, even bytecode caching helps only so much.
PHP shines speed-wise exactly with the kind of "html-and-php-code" soup most pro developers despise. When Yahoo claim they use PHP, they in fact use it as a templating language in exactly this kind of "soup", their actual backend is C and Java.
This is why I'm really surprised at what CodeGear is trying to pull off here. As a developer of an in-house component based template engine myself, I know how painfully slow PHP becomes when you try to abstract some of your logic away in classes and so on. Various "PHP OOP" efforts like Zend's own framework or EZ Components prove my point as well.
Delphi's visual approach with VLC is just a huge bunch of abstraction. I can only imagine the kind of speed these PHP apps will have.. In fact you can pretty much say this effort is doomed from the very moment "PHP" got involved.