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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"
They're referring to dynamically updating forms, such as when you have two combo boxes, select something in one, and the options change in another, or when you enter a search filter, and the table of found records updates without reloading the entire page.
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).
.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.
Two things made Borland wreck their scene: 1) losing their creative minds to Microsoft, specially Anders Hejlsberg, 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
Writing insecure web applications in less time. Thanks Borland! ;-)
Another desperate attempt by Borland/Codegear to appease their dwindling developer community.
Delphi is dead. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Y
>> Web apps need to be written in proper code, with MVC, and templates, not as code embedded in individual pages.
What, you mean like every developer worth their wage in PHP has been doing for the last x years?
Do try and keep up...
No, I was in fact thinking the exact reverse.
Although it's still strange, this thinking in terms of TLA's.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
You can use PHP to write web apps with proper code, MVC and templates through the use of frameworks (CakePHP, php.MVC, Zend, etc, or your own). The purpose of a language is not to provide you with all those things. You have to work for them, no matter what language you're writing in.
With php, code is seperated from the design, templates handling the visuals.
all major software like phpbb et al are like that.
you can make it so that not a single byte of code mingles with template if you wish.
php offers liberty on seperating content with the code. some do not, some do.
Read radical news here
Your way of thinking is outdated. There are many frameworks that facilitate proper MVC, templating, and a separation of duties. Check out CodeIgniter, CakePHP, and symfony, three of the most popular frameworks for PHP. Development techniques and approaches in PHP have changed significantly in the last few years.
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
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.
"Web apps need to be written in proper code, with MVC, and templates, not as code embedded in individual pages."
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.
It helps to know what you're talking about before you spout off. Just because lots of people build rickety shacks out of stone, doesn't mean you can't build a solid castle out of it too.
It's this kind of generalization that pisses me off. It's not the language, it's your crappy skills.
If this year was 2000 then I would agree with you. PHP has quite a few MVC frameworks that have been around for some time and are fairly extensively used in enterprise environments. If you know any developers embedding their PHP in the HTML in large apps please ask them to stop.
Here is a small example of a few MVCs out there.
CakePHP - http://www.cakephp.org/
Symfony - http://www.symfony-project.com/
Zend Framework - http://framework.zend.com/
I guess I could have been clearer. Controls on the page can be linked to datasets on the server. The mechanism is AJAX from the browser to the server; then the server deals with the database; and a return to the browser. But all you have to do is define a dataset, and set properties on the control (list box, table, etc.) to point to the dataset.
It appears to be the regular PHP, but they've created a library for common controls. (Yes, they made a library for making textboxes and radio buttons. -yawn-) At first I thought it was a php plugin written in C or something, but no... It's just plain PHP. What was wrong with making the controls in HTML like always, I dunno.
I'll admit, I've written a function to take an array and make a dropdown box from it, but Delphi's VCL is going a bit far, I think.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
So use CakePHP and your problems and issues with PHP will be solved...
var sig = function() { sig(); }
With all due respect , .NET is a great platform for enterprise-level development.
.NET doesn't run worth shit on my company's Solaris and HP-UX systems. Yes, we're talking about real enterprise systems here. Some Intel box running Windows 2003 Server and .NET does not constitute actual enterprise development. Real enterprise work is done on UNIX systems like Solaris, HP-UX, and AiX.
.NET and Java just can't offer the execution speed necessary for really large-scale enterprise apps. That's why we still use C++ in many cases. And yes, I know that in a small number of unrealistic microbenchmarks Java is shown to be faster than the equivalent C++. But in reality, that's just not the case. .NET and Java just don't scale well enough.
Hardly.
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.
I am open source, and Linux baby!
What I like about PHP is that it's flexible enough to do either kind of programming. Being an ASP.Net programmer, I sometimes wish it were just easier to mix the code and presentation when making a quick page. On large projects, it's good not to mix the two, but sometimes throwing together a simple page is easier if you can mix code and presentation.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
It's largely based on the qooxdoo javascript library.
Check the demos here and here.
Slashdot anagrams to "Sad Sloth"
There are plenty of web sites running on janky systems that are, ya know, bigger than 'really large-scale enterprise apps'.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
No I thought that too. I also thought uh, php mysql nice NIX tools yes but a delphi IDE that only runs on Windows.
Bah will never work. If your into webdev on windows your a VS c# organ grinder nothing more.
Ibbo
Linux user #349545 (GNU/Linux)iD8DBQBAzWjX+MZAIjBWXGURAmflAKCntuBbuK
Anyone can make a language or framework insecure. PHP just makes it easier than most.
Are you subscribed to the Secunia security mailing list? A good 1/3 - 1/2 of them are flaws in PHP applications with widespread installation bases. That says something about the language, whether it is the language itself or the prominent users of the language, but I suspect it is a combination of both.
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.
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.
agreed, this was just buzzwords being flung with mad abandon.
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.)
... because CodeGear offer this trial on their web site:
"Free, fully functional 1 day trial"
Right, 1 day.
Great.
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 specific).
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..
Got Code?
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 a middle ground between VB and templatized C++, plus the compiler's crazy fast, perfect for the kind of incremental debugging that comes naturally with prototyping.
If they've managed to accomplish this with PHP/Ajax, we'll be seeing a new breed of web apps, coded not by Java dweebs or Ajax hacks, but by seasoned app designers... a little less flair and CSS shenanigans, and more direct interactivity and usability.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Also check out Prado for a component-oriented framework along the lines of JSF or ASP.NET (its design seems to be inspired more by the latter). I deeply loathe PHP, but Prado does look very nice.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
HTML was wrong because if you write the stuff yourself they had nothing to sell.
Worst part, while I'm not sure if you can ever stop using Delphi for PHP and still be able to further develop your app, or become trapped in both the IDE and the Windows platform.
Got Pike?
A good IDE is worth its weight in gold. It doesn't need helper libraries to make it great.
I think you are right about being trapped in it, though... The VCL, if nothing else, would trap you irrevocably. But then, they're treating it more like an IDE for different language, and being tied to a language is true for any language. Just like Ruby on Rails is treated differently than plain Ruby.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
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..):
<?php echo "Hello World" ?>
What does Delphi do?
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:
<?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.
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 put some heavy load on the webserver/app in total. Also, unlike popular believe, PHP is not about presentation, while Delphi is quite a lot about presentation. Positioning elements on your form/webpage is something you do through HTML/CSS.
Delphi for PHP is sort of a competitor to Dreamweaver. And on the programming side I think Delphi for PHP is much better, but the design part if probably worse. Also, no serious PHP programmer uses Dreamweaver to develop PHP applications. I don't think Delphi for PHP will ever be a way to create RIAs. I think they would have a better chance when they made a Delphi for Flash/* (where * is a server side thingy like ASP/PHP/Perl/...). At least Flash features a more Delphi like environment, and Flash could seriously use a better interface for "application" development.
but the problems with speed are down to the coding faults people make because they have not a clue how java really works (not a clue about .net - never worked with it). OC you may say that because java folk is an uneducated lot then it is irrelevant whether java code can be fast or not - dead weight of java coder will kill the speed anyway. //
not to mention Zend's solution: The Zend Framework.
Is this a misprint? Are they kidding?
s ions/Delphi/DelphiforPHP/tabid/250/Default.aspx
http://www.codegear.com/Downloads/TrialandFreeVer
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.
"To work for libertarianism -- to oppose the growth of government and aid the liberation of the individual -- used to be
That's not true. The IDE Product is commercial, the VCL for PHP library is open source (to be hosted on Sourceforge, should be there any day now). YOu aren't trapped. You can go back to VIM at any time. Warren
You probably already know this then, but eclipse can be used to develop php as well:
PHPeclipse User Manual
Please mod me down as an old fashioned technology-phobic luddite .....
:!! out to a shellscript that generates a template given a table name. Its not rocket science.
.. 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.
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
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
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 ?
I don't know about the Delphi PHP IDE in the article, but if you are looking for a new develpoment enviroment, I would strongly recomend trying eclipse http://www.eclipse.org/ with PHPeclipse http://www.phpeclipse.net/tiki-view_articles.php and XAMPP http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html. This compination is far more powerful than Dreamweaver, free (as in beer and speech), and has plugins available to support almost every every language I can think of. Which will help you in learning new languages with out having to learn a new IDE. Inaddition it can be made to run off a USB drive. Eclipse is java based so it is available for linux windows or osX.
The only advantage Dreamweaver may have is the WYSIWYG editor. There is an eclipse plugin for this (included in easy eclipse mentioned below) but I haven't used this much, since it's geneally faster and more reliable to edit the code to get the result I want. PHPeclipse includes an browser preview pane that, with the exception of directly editing the view in a WYSIWYG maner, is just as functional.
My two favorite features are the integration with XAMPP (an extrememly easy to setup and use local LAMP web server, which should work with Dreamweaver too) which allows for a Dreamweaver style design view for PHP code, and the Remote System Explorer (RSE) http://www.eclipse.org/dsdp/tm/tutorial/ plugin which allows you to connect and work on files on a remote webserver as if they were local, which is great for quick fixes and fixing typos.
To use eclipse, PHPeclipse, and XAMPP to create a portable development environment on a USB drive, check out http://www.plog4u.org/index.php/Using_PHPEclipse:I nstallation:XAMPP_Example_Installation for eclipse and PHP eclipse installation into XAMPP and this thread http://portableapps.com/node/929 to make it all portable. I would also recomend checking out http://www.easyeclipse.org/site/home/ for easy installation of eclipse with many of the most useful plugins preinstalled for you.
My subtext is just a figment of your imagination.
I think Borland should have written a GUI-over-HTTP browser using Delphi. Instead of an HTML browser, it would use a GUI-oriented protocol/language that had real GUI features instead of the clunky HTML+DOM. The server-side code would then control the GUI using some kind of XML language. That way it wouldn't matter what server-like language you used. (It would target mostly intranets, not public internet apps.)
Borland wouldn't make money off the browser itself, but rather those who buy Delphi to customize the GUI-browser for their own needs. It is sort like a modifiable Flash-forms engine.
The intranet market is clamoring for real GUI's that don't need software explicitly installed on the desktop (at least not for each app).
Table-ized A.I.
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.
.NET stuff has been about as unsuccessful, again because the people doing those things already have a way they want to do it. And when these products don't have a big market, they get neglected. And when they are neglected, even those who would have tried to use them are turned off by the crappy quality. So they wither and die, while the read Delphi remains. Even with all this waste effort dragging the company down, Delphi remains.
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 you that there's a reason. It is a damn good language and solves business problems in ways that can be FAR superior to anything MS has put out. It's just generally a less painful process.
However, pretty much everything else that Borland has done has failed because there is no nice for it. C++ Builder had some success, but the people going that route were already firmly entrenched in MS or open source products. The same is true for their Java IDE. Then they tried getting into linux with Kylix and Qt stuff. Again, no market. Their C# and
Sadly, it appears CodeGear is going to follow in their footsteps. I give the Delphi for PHP thing a year before they stop updating it. Then another year or two before they drop it altogether. Yet again, it's a product without a market.
Thing is, I don't see why I'd want to leave Vim in the first place.
I downloaded the ONE DAY trial (Ahem!), but couldn't get any sample apps to deploy because my web host is only running PHP version 4.4.4.
The complaints aren't all bogus. PHP does have a number of painful points. Probably the one that's given me the most trouble is error handling. PHP has exceptions, but most of the error handling in the language doesn't use exception. Then there's fatal errors which aren't really possible to handle (you can use an output buffer handler, but that introduces other problems which may/may not be worth the effort).
PHP also has those crazy globals floating all over the place. Sure, you can implement your own MVC-like architecture, but why should you have to do the work?
Finally, the object model in PHP has a number of deficiencies (C++/Java programmer may not notice; but if you've ever learned Python, PHP will make you cry). Much of this has been fixed in PHP5, but there are still a good number of things you can't do (mostly because classes are not first-class objects).
That said, it still is my first choice in most situations due to it's massive level of support from web hosts and acceptance among web developers.
I guess I could have been clearer. Controls on the page can be linked to datasets on the server. The mechanism is AJAX from the browser to the server; then the server deals with the database; and a return to the browser. But all you have to do is define a dataset, and set properties on the control (list box, table, etc.) to point to the dataset.
That sounds more like a security disaster. Freely linking stuff to the data source (including modification) is nice for a desktop app, but when the data is on your server, and the client (web page) falls into the wrong hands...
ASP.NET mitigates this my pushing the actual processing of data changes into the controller (they call it "code-behind"), but if Delphi for PHP blindly copies the data binding from Delphi... get ready for some hard-core hacking action.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Yeah, and everyone should eat their vegetables, brush their teeth, drive the speed limit, etc etc etc. My code would probably make a seasoned developer weep but my apps are simple, they work, I'm able to maintain them easily, and hundreds of people use them daily with no ill effects. The whole point of PHP--and I've heard Rasmus Lerdorf say this personally--is to make it easy for people to crank out apps that are useful. Period. I don't stay awake worrying that some CS grad (or worse, some self-taught RoR fanboy) won't like that I've mixed data and presentation. I try to keep things somewhat neat, but if I need to jump into the middle of a table and say
<td<?php if ('somethingBad'==$currentValue) { print ' bgcolor="red"'; } ?>>
I will.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
How much does an IDE weigh and where can I exchange it for some bullion?
I hate printers.
Agreed... of course, software doesn't really weigh anything.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
First of all: All Delphi bashers please shut up. We know Delphi and the IDE concepts it represents are 15 years old but nevertheless it is a neat tool. Some of the best developers I know still like to use it. And if you don't remember the time when Borland jBuilder and it's other IDEs where like 10 years ahead of the rest then you're not qualified to rant. End of story. Thank you.
:-)
On Delphi for PHP:
I watched the Screencasts (by some indish guy with a heavy accent). The features are cool and developing stuff goes really snappy. I liked the Ajax components shown.
Then again it has downsides:
a) Windows only.
b) No integrated debugger - the other notable Windows-only PHP Tool 'NuSpere PHPEd' has a fully integrated webserver with a preinstalled runtime and callstack debugger + profiler. It's tough to beat that.
What I kind of liked:
I like the integrated Interbase/Firebird stuff - out-of the box views and stuff inside an integrated DB admin UI. Sadly without a grafical ERD interface. I also like the visual form layout tool. Allthough my designer would probably kill me if I'd use it in a project.
For me it boils down to this: While I - amongst other PLs - do PHP for a living and thus have no trouble spending 300$ or more on a productivity tool that does it's job better and faster than EasyEclipse, the stuff they offer just isn't good enough.
I want Zope with intergrated full-blow Ajax (YUI or something) and a web based developement interface with quasi-grafic ERD, View and Object assembly. All in PHP so it runs on the most shoddy webspace available. With the looks of the Joomla Backend, so my eyes don't bleed after 5 minutes. With a Java of Flash client if needed.
The sad thing I have to tell Borland and Nusphere is that all this will probably be finished by the OSS community even before they port their tools to Linux and OS X. We've got Symfony, CakePHP, Prado, Yahoos YUI, and ten bazillion other PHP and Ajax kits, not to mention the hysteric Rails crowd. Plus the Zope and Django people. We've got KDevelop and Eclipse and Netbeans and Anjuta and Erics Python IDE and Whatnot competing over who's got the larges dick and when MySQL AB finally get's their shit together we'll have MySQL Workbench for free which will give MySQL 5 yet another big push forward and scare the living wee-wee out of Oracle and Co. .
The world simply is moving to fast for me to just buy an IDE that forces me back on to the plattform I hate on a hunch. Mix Delphi for PHP and NuSpere PHPEd and add a visual case tool. Then I'll consider spending 300$ and installing Win2k again. Until then I'll stick with EasyEclipse for PHP on OS X. Even though it's a slowpoke at times.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Shhhhhh... It sounds better if they don't think about that ;)
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
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 to suppress. You really should be able to get clean compiles, either by fixing the problem or using the appropriate suppression flag if you want to accept the warned condition because compile cluttered with warnings you ignore can have you overlook something that really is a warning.
By the way, if you are still using Delphi 6, there was some kind of service pack to it a while ago that fixed a memory leak with Variant arrays or some such thing -- one really shouldn't use an out-of-the-box Delphi 6 unless it has been patched for this.
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.
What are you listening to? (http://megamanic.blogetery.com/)
A slight disagreement there. Don't be so quick to slam Dreamweaver. Especially 8.
Eclipse is great if you write classes all day but if you design real world web sites Dreamweaver 8 is at least as good an option as Eclipse.
With Eclipse you get fewer code highlighting options, worse code search, no built in reference, no site synchronization tools, no ftp, no decent visual editor (still useful for those quick pages and/or finding and jumping to the the right code to edit in a template file), and since it's Java it just feels wrong compared to C programs. There are more things lacking as well which are useful for web developers and not just code heads. Dreamwevaer is still the champ for people who can afford it.
The main difference is: Eclipse is aimed primarlily for programmers... Dreamweaver is for web site developers. If you fall in the middle like me... you can use either one but for me it's mostly DW until Adobe manages to eff it up or people develop better plugins to Eclipse.
Absolutely agree with parent.
.Net takes the same path, and has not been booming, except inside all-ms shops.
Lots of people nowadays will be happy to tell you how there are 100 (free) MVC php frameworks and templating systems out there that allow "proper" enterprise web app coding instead of the ugly db-logic-presentation mixup that php developers enjoyed yesteryear.
The fact is that much of that framework craze is pure hype. And the java web development crowd should testify to that: how many frameworks du-jour have seen the ligth to be abandoned a couple of months / years later? JSF, javabeans, portlets, you name it.
All the while quick-n-dirty php conquered the web.
IMHO the main error is trying to abstract too much out of the HTTP(+HTML+CSS) model: OOP guys love to pretend they're coding inside a GUI app, and let the magical framework do the translation for them. Then one day they wake up and the realize that either: for drawing one html page that framework issues 1000 ajax calls - bad for scalability, customer gets real pissed, project canned, or: that shiny new css property that would allow page design to be 100% perfect is not part of the framework, sorry dude, or: no way to update only part of your web page via ajax without completely breaking the framework - it's his job to compose the page, after all, or: the html the framework spits is not firefox compliant, etc...
Keep It Simple folks!
php is dead easy for the web because it follows spot-on the web model. One html page = one php script. GET, POST, COOKIES always accessible within your app. Stick as little data into the session as you can. Let the VM clean up at the end of every single request all junk the programmer allocated. etc...
AFAIK, delphi for delphi had this kind of design-with-a-gui-we-translate-to-html power years ago, and I've never seen a single web app deployed like that.
Plus, people that do not know coding use flash already. Little value added in switching.
PHP also has those crazy globals floating all over the place.
Which crazy globals do you mean? You don't have any globals in functions or method unless you import them. Or do you mean the 9 super globals? I don't know what's crazy about them. The way they are written is very easy to distinguish from other variables. Thus if you don't want them to be used directly it's very easy to enforce your rules with a simple grep.
I'll take it a step further. Borland/Inprise/whatever is such a bad company that I'd never knowingly start a serious
.Net would not exist (and consequently, stole Borland's thunder) or the
project that depends upon them or their products in any way.
Never *ever* again.
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
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.
ozgur uksal
http://www.adobe.com/
Admittedly, I'd never heard of CakePHP before. It looks like an interesting project.
As far as CakePHP solving the issue goes though... no, it won't. CakePHP is an MVC inside an interpreted-every-time V, which is part of a rebuilt-every-time MVC. This is very inefficient, obviously. It's pretty much doomed to be that way, because, as I said, PHP is designed to run inside pages, rather than to run and provide pages. CakePHP would be a reasonable alternative for MVC on legacy shared hosting that didn't provide anything but PHP, but for all intents and purposes, it should be avoided, imho.