Wednesday 12 November 2008

Delphi.Net and the Internet

A few days ago, I posted about Delphi 2009. I was pleased with the additions that Codegear had made to the suite and speculated that it could be a possible migration route from pure Delphi over to .Net. I have had a think about this now and have sort of changed my mind. Using Delphi 2009 it seems to me that mature code written in Delphi could be used in any other .Net application - this includes Net powered websites.

So, instead of being a migration to .Net from Delphi, it is more along the lines of making use of good, solid Delphi code that has been developed over a number of years in a .Net envronment. I really like this idea and am interested to see how many Delphi developers would look into this. It certainly opens up a whole new world of possibility.

Friday 7 November 2008

Delphi and .Net

I have been looking at Delphi 2009 lately. Pascal was the first programming language I ever learned, I would imagine that this is the same for many people my age, so to take a look at Delphi after so long is a bit nostalgic for me.

However, in saying that, I have always stayed away from Delphi as a development tool - a lot of the work I do needs to be cross platform and this is something that hasnt always been do-able with Delphi. However, version 2009 not only includes updates to Delphi.Net, but also includes Generics and anyonmous methods - it also adds user definable build configurations. This might seem a petty thing to be pleased about, but for anyone developing or working with cross platform soloutions, this is a godsend.

At first glance, the .Net abilities of Delphi 2009 seem to suggest that Codegear would like people to migrate from regular Delphi over to .Net - the IDE supports developing VB.Net and C# applications as well as Delphi and Delphi.Net apps. Personally, I am a little surprised that Microsoft hasn't tried its own version of Delphi.Net and called it D# or something - there are so many systems out in the wild using Delphi in a Windows environment.

As it stands right now, there is nothing stopping you from migrating core logic into C#, for instance, and using this in a Delphi.Net UI. I think this is a nice stepping stone for systems written in Delphi to make the hop from the desktop and onto the web, but we shall just have to wait and see. There is a wide dirth of new languages soon to be available under the .Net framework like Python, Ruby and F#, so it looks like the trend is moving towards dynamic languages for the time being.