Programming

Delphi has come a long ways since it was first released in 1995. It now compiles 32-bit or 64-bit, still creates console or Windows applications but now also can create Android and iOS apps if you have the FireMonkey library and cross-platform tools, you can create Android and iOS apps.

As an independent software developer, I make my living writing scripts and applications for others. In order to maximize my opportunities, I need to be a master of many environments. Since much of my career has involved Windows applications, I am spending quite a bit of effort in other areas.

Having worked in Delphi for many years, I've seen the development tool and it's RTL evolve significantly, yet remain resilient in backwards compatibility. Early on, to prevent your application from running multiple times, there were generally two different approaches:

1. Search for the name of your app's main form by name, or
2. Search for a "mutex" created by your app.

Why is it that when companies have a good thing, they have to go mess it up by changing its design? I've seen this in many different industries but since change happens so much more quickly in software, I seem to be annoyed much more often with changes in user interface.

A friend of mine runs a business selling a Windows application for a niche market. Of course he has a web site with lots of information and a way to download a trial of his software and then pay and register it. Since he's a technical person, likes writing code, likes to keep overhead low, and his needs are fairly simple, he wrote the registration program himself. He's most fluent in Delphi so it was natural to write the registration program in Delphi--an old, but very functional Delphi 2007.

Some of my blog entries are just to remind myself how to do things later--and on several occasions they've been useful in that regard. I hope they are also useful to others that may encounter similar struggles. This is another one of those articles which I will likely refer back to at some point.

I'm a long time Delphi user and have taken advantage of the Object Repository quite a bit. It's really handy to take a unit or project that might be useful somewhere else but in a slightly different form and add it to the repository. Later, when you need to use that bit of code, you can select it from the repository right from within Delphi and it will make a copy of that code in your new project.

I recently watched most of a dotnetConf, a virtual conference on .NET hosted by Microsoft. All the sessions were recorded and there's a lot of good and relevant content.

I was programming Win32 apps in Delphi while listening and I felt myself yearning for the cool technologies they were discussing. Yeah, Delphi has grown up a bit, but it's no longer the leader, it's following and getting further and further behind the rest of the development community.

Several months ago, I posted a question about developer tools and felt I was at crossroads of sorts. The choice to move away from what is familiar is never easy, but I felt stronger about taking a hard look at the future of how I would approach software than I had in the past.

When I was in college heading for a degree in Computer Science, I wondered why I needed History or Psychology or English or Art. Hadn't I had enough of that in high school? Why couldn't I just take fun stuff like Assembly Language or Advanced Data Structures? My parents tried to tell me about well-rounded education, how important professional communication is, and the benefits of knowing about the world around me, but it was hard for me to put much more than the minimal effort required to get the grades in those "non-essential" classes.

I've used Pascal-based compilers for a long time. Similar to many others like me, I started with Turbo Pascal 3 in the 80s, embraced object-oriented extensions in Borland Pascal, attempted to understand OWL but quickly moved to Delphi when it was released, and now churn out blazing database applications on the latest Windows operating systems using internet technologies, advanced reporting tools, and multiple third-party component sets. Sure, I've dabbled in other languages such as C/C++, Visual Basic, .NET with C#, and some scripting languages, but Delphi has been the bulk of my experience for the past 17 years or so.

My blog about HTML5 Builder has been elementary and positive so far. But I've had problems--I just haven't mentioned them yet. Well, it's time to do that before going further. I'm using the product on two different machines and am having two different experiences.

While still working with a PHP web server application, let's create a simple component, install it, and modify the Hello World app to use it.

The first application I'll create will be similar to sample ones I had tried in RadPHP. They were simple PHP tutorials and they worked--somewhat. I had some issues, but don't remember whether it was getting all the right libraries in the right place or whether it worked from some locations or browsers or what. In any case, I'm hoping HTML5 Builder will make the process a little smoother.

It's been a year since my last blog entry and while I've been busy writing Windows applications with Delphi, I've kept an eye on web technologies. I've done some PHP in the past and had purchased RadPHP XE but didn't upgrade to the XE2 version because there were practically no new features and the documentation, which was pitiful, was not improved one bit--in fact it was still labeled XE!

While working on a project accessing a slow web service, I found myself needing to extend the timeout of the HTTPRIO component. The web service, when executed straight from a browser, would happily take as long as it needed to before successfully completing. But my Delphi application was timing out.

In the last entry, I gave an overview of the large software update I delivered to a client, an update that should've been done incrementally over a period of several months. From database schema changes, to swapping out a reporting engine, to switching from ANSI to Unicode, I really bit off more than I could chew at once. But it's now working well and I'm once again sleeping at night!

This portion of the story deals with the database changes that were made, both the structure and the character set.

I recently gave a client a major update to their custom application. Actually, "major" doesn't even do it justice. It was more like "mega major" and I don't think I'll take the approach I did ever again. But I wanted to move their code to the latest compilers and to support the latest operating systems. I also needed to change some low-level database constructs. Why all this? Because I'm a best-practices sort of guy.

In the old DOS days, things were simple. You had 25 rows and 80 columns of text. Period. Well, if you knew the right tricks, you could double the rows or columns, but still it was pretty limited. This made programming fairly easy--you knew how much space you had to deal with. With a GUI, or Graphical User Interface, things can get stretched out, you can have larger fonts, and you can have themes on or off. So knowing how much space you have to display stuff isn't quite as cut and dried. But I'm going to look at just one aspect that can be surprising: themes.

Adding theme support to your application can give your program a whole new look (if you use standard Windows controls) without changing anything else. This works because the controls will actually use a different set of DLLs behind the scene. In Delphi 2007, this is accomplished with a simple checkbox in the project options. (Visit the Delphi Wikia page and search for "Adding Theme Support" for more information.) The DateTimePicker is one of these and I just discovered its new capabilities when themed on Vista or Windows 7.

I've recently acquired the latest Pascal language compiler from RemObjects, Oxygene. Embarcadero, now the owners of Delphi, decided not to continue development of Delphi for .NET, but instead license this compiler plug-in for Visual Studio from RemObjects. So if you get RAD Studio 2009 from Embarcedero, which includes Delphi 2009 for Win32, you also get a special single-language version of Microsoft Visual Studio with the Pascal compiler from RemObjects.

To emphasize the importance of a modal form and the information it presents, you could gray out the main form of the application when the modal form is activated. Here's how to add a dim-out effect to your main form when modal forms are waiting for the user input.