Re: Should i leran delphi instead?

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From: Joseph M. Newcomer (newcomer_at_flounder.com)
Date: 08/29/04

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    Date: Sun, 29 Aug 2004 03:56:00 -0400

    They're just systems. Languages and runtime environments. Actually, for raw productivity,
    VB is considered excellent, if all you care about is a sexy GUI.

    Here's a story: one of my clients came to me. He'd just paid another consultant some large
    number of dollars for an extremely sexy GUI interface written in VB. He was now a month
    from deployment, and discovered that behind that GUI, there was nothing. It was just a
    GUI. No database interface, no network connectivity. But a sexy GUI.

    Could I help? He'd even pay me a bonus if I got anything working by the time he was
    supposed to deliver, because of the penalty clause in his contract.

    I reimplemented the entire GUI with one exception, built the database library interface
    (not ODBC, by the way), and the network communication, in three weeks using MFC. He had a
    week to test and found very few bugs, mostly trivial cosmetics and a couple dumb
    uninitialized pointer errors.

    The missing feature? In VB, the buttons changed color when pushed and reverted to the
    original color when released. My buttons were stock buttons, not owner-draw (the client
    did not want to include the owner-draw time in the budget).

    There is very little I cannot do in MFC that other GUI design tools provide. But I've
    found that most of these tools have so many built-in assumptions about the environment
    they run in that they cannot support anything else, such as raw API interface,
    asynchronous network interfaces, general asynchronous I/O, event log interfaces, complex
    messaging, multithreading, and synchronizaiton. I have had to consult with any number of
    firms whose problems fall into these domains; their programmers don't know how to do these
    things, and the systems they are using do not provide necessary support. So before you
    focus on something as trivial as GUI support, make sure the systems are open-ended and can
    support real programs behind the GUI, not just be designed to create pretty toys. Early
    Java systems were a prime example of cute-toys-but-no-substance as far as GUI design.

    >From my experience, Java or C# might be better choices. Java can't handle asynchronous
    I/O, and I'm not sure if C# can, Neither has a document/view model. Most Java programmers
    I know who have learned C# claim that C# solves a number of fundamental problems of Java,
    and none have said that C# has any technical flaws. The reasons for choosing one over the
    other usually depend upon external factors.

    I don't know enough about the current versions of Delphi to comment on how well they
    address any of these issues. I used an earlier version and it was, to put it mildly,
    pitiful. Drove me crazy trying to integrate my changes into an existing piece of code,
    because most of what I needed to do it (back then) did not exist in the language, and only
    with great difficulty doing raw API calls. But I think that may have been the first Win32
    version, and I only took it on as a favor to a client. Perhaps it has improved a lot in
    these areas. Besides, I truly hate the Pascal language. It has all the syntactic elegance
    of FORTRAN without the powerful semantics (I once spent a year maintaining about 10K lines
    of Pascal code, one of the worst years I ever spent. Surprisingly, Delphi doesn't seem to
    do much about the basic flaws of Pascal).
                                            joe

    On Sat, 28 Aug 2004 17:53:54 +0200, "Bredal Jensen" <Bredal.Jensen@mimosa.com> wrote:

    >
    >My short experience in using MFC to try and build first class User interface
    >application
    >is leading me to beleive that i may be using the wrong tool.
    >Things are not simple. I have spent one week using using delphi and the
    >result is oustanding.
    >Things that users would consider nice to have are extremely complicated to
    >do with MFC.
    >Why is that the case.
    >
    >Does anyone know about a comparative analysis of delphi <-->Vc++/MFC.
    >
    >
    >Thank you?
    >

    Joseph M. Newcomer [MVP]
    email: newcomer@flounder.com
    Web: http://www.flounder.com
    MVP Tips: http://www.flounder.com/mvp_tips.htm

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