Newbie questions about Delphi...
Kevinp
Who is Embarcadero? What happened to Borland?
What is the difference between Delphi and 'Delphi for NET'? Can't one program do both?
Does Delphi only work on Windows? Can I write programs for Linux?
Can I do more with Delphi than VB? Is there any real advantage to switching?
Rob Kennedy
> Who is Embarcadero? What happened to Borland?
A couple of years ago, Borland spun off its development products to
create a new company, CodeGear, with the intention of selling it.
Embarcadero bought.
> What is the difference between Delphi and 'Delphi for NET'? Can't one program do both?
Delphi is the language. It's also the product name, generally.
Specifically, though, there are many product names. The ones with
"studio" in their names usually include multiple "personalities," such
as one for Win32 programming in Delphi, one for .Net programming in
Delphi, and one for Win32 programming in C++. The 2006 edition of the
product yielded a "turbo" line of products, which included just one
personality each; the "explorer" versions were (and still are) free, and
the "professional" ones were not. I don't know whether the turbo
professional ones are available anymore since they're now two versions
behind the latest release, Delphi 2009, which supports Win32 development
exclusively, for Delphi and C++. I understand there will be another .Net
offering sometime in Q1 or Q2 next year.
> Does Delphi only work on Windows? Can I write programs for Linux?
Not with Delphi. Maybe for .Net, with Mono. Other key search terms: Free
Pascal (fpc), Lazarus.
> Can I do more with Delphi than VB?
Not right now. You barely even know Delphi.
What is it that you _want_ to do, or that you think you're going to want
to do? It doesn't matter _what_ Delphi can do if you don't need any of
those abilities.
> Is there any real advantage to switching?
--
Rob
Hans-Peter Diettrich
> What is the difference between Delphi and 'Delphi for NET'? Can't one
> program do both?
Applications for Windows (native) and .NET require different compilers,
just like for VB and VB.NET. But of course you can develop both kinds of
applications with the same Delphi IDE.
> Does Delphi only work on Windows? Can I write programs for Linux?
As already mentioned, FreePascal/Lazarus is widely compatible with
Delphi, and can produce binaries for a wide range of platforms.
> Can I do more with Delphi than VB? Is there any real advantage to
> switching?
After writing my VB decompiler in VB, I switched to Delphi because it
offered me many more features :-)
Delphi is not bound to Access or the proprietary MS database API, what
makes the move not so easy. But once you made a database accessible,
almost the same methods and controls can be used to work with the
database, also in Delphi.
DoDi
Rudy Velthuis
> I've been database programming with VB for about ten years now. I've
> 'played' with Delphi a little bit many years ago and was curious
> about it again. I have a few questions:
>
> Who is Embarcadero? What happened to Borland?
Borland started to concentrate more and more on business solutions and
neglecting the programmer, although they were originally a developer
products company. They decided to spin off their development products
as a subsidiary company, called CodeGear. After looking for a buyer for
some time, CodeGear was finally bought by Embaracadero, which already
developed DB products.
>
> What is the difference between Delphi and 'Delphi for NET'? Can't one
> program do both?
.NET is a different platform and code for .NET won't just run on
Windows without .NET. .NET also requires different approaches, since
.NET is a managed platform. The code generated for a .NET program is
also entirely different.
So no, one program can't do both.
--
Rudy Velthuis http://rvelthuis.de
"Biologically speaking, if something bites you it's more likely
to be female." -- Desmond Morris.
Kenneth Porter
@mid.individual.net:
> As already mentioned, FreePascal/Lazarus is widely compatible with
> Delphi, and can produce binaries for a wide range of platforms.
Are they able to work with BDE?
(I've got an old Paradox app and I'd like to write something in parallel in
a more modern language that can access the same Paradox version 7 table
files.)
Kevinp
I'll probably dabble a little with Delphi when I have the time. When I played with it before years ago, it was to create an auto-run program for a CD. The Delphi executable would run straight off the CD, where VB had to have the run-time files
installed.
Kenneth Porter
news:e3r7f41nirctchkdk...@4ax.com:
> I'll probably dabble a little with Delphi when I have the time. When I
> played with it before years ago, it was to create an auto-run program
> for a CD. The Delphi executable would run straight off the CD, where
> VB had to have the run-time files installed.
In other words, the Delphi program was statically linked.
Dynamic linking is generally a feature, in that it allows multiple programs
to share the same library code, both on disk and in memory. But it also can
be a burden in packaging, so one often chooses static linking to reduce the
number of files deployed.
In today's environment of massive memory and disks, saving space is no
longer so important. But dynamic linking also offers the potential
advantage of fixing the same library bug in many executables
simultaneously. I don't see this done much in the Windows world except in
the issuing of OS patches, but it's very common in the Linux world to
release 3rd party library fixes to address a system-wide issue. Then again,
in the Linux world, *everything* is 3rd party.
Rob Kennedy
> Kevinp <kev...@nospam.com> wrote in
> news:e3r7f41nirctchkdk...@4ax.com:
>
>> I'll probably dabble a little with Delphi when I have the time. When I
>> played with it before years ago, it was to create an auto-run program
>> for a CD. The Delphi executable would run straight off the CD, where
>> VB had to have the run-time files installed.
>
> In other words, the Delphi program was statically linked.
No. You can load DLLs off a CD. The current directory and the
application's own directory are both searched for DLLs. LoadLibrary will
accept a path to removable storage.
It's likely that the VB program needed some ActiveX controls to be
registered, or, like Kevin said, it needed the VB RTL to be installed.
The VB interpreter is not just a DLL that the application loads.
--
Rob