Delphi

Endurance Man

So i started a new job recently, its really a college placement for my degree but im getting paid so im calling it a job .
Anyway they program in Delphi , we where taught Java in college and this is the first time im coming up against another language. Feels like im starting again.

Wanted to find out what everyone thought about delphi? Is it difficult to get to grips with? Also are their any third party compilers that i should check it?

Was also wondering if anyone could point me in the direction of some decent guides/tutorials/learning material of any sort.

Cheers
Endo

tolosenc

It's Pascal, isn't it?

It's quite different to C, C++ and Java - the main ones taught in colleges.

dazberry

As a work placement - cool, but I wouldn't make a career out of it tbh. There are only a handful of companies left using Delphi - and most of the work is likely crap legacy work. Delphi is IMO a brillant tool - but I don't think people ever really appreciated the true flexibility and power of it - and just considered it a Pascal version of VB. Its a shame but sure the world moves on. Again not a bad college placement - my college placement (years and years and years ago) was working in a bank on a CBT using a dodgy scripting language

Language wise you really should have very little issue in moving from Java to Delphi, there's nothing that's really anyway complex, just different - obviously { .. } are now comment delimiters and you're now stuck with begins and ends. The biggest change is that you've no garbage collection - (which I think everyone should experience at some point), so you have to free what you create.

Since I gather its Delphi 7 you're using, you should try to pickup Marco Cantù's Mastering Delphi 7 for reference, and also have a peak at this article. Also take a look at http://www.delphibasics.co.uk/, and subscribe to the Delphi newsgroups on newsgroups.borland.com. I probably can answer most of your questions too - and since I'm hardly rushed off my feet with Delphi questions these days feel free to post or PM as suits.

Having worked in Delphi for well over 10 years now :eek: and having had to pick up a lot of "Delphi experts" really sh1t code on a number of occasions - the best advice I think I can give you is: you've most likely learned about classes, inheritence, design patterns etc from Java - you can do those things in Delphi too - but because Delphi allows you to drop a button on a form and immediately write all code behind it - doesn't mean you have to!

Best of luck in the job!

D.

Endurance Man

Thanks for the replys lads.
Daz, i shall keep you in mind over the next few weeks and months :], think im gonna need all the help i can get.

seamus

I coded in Delphi for a few months when I first started college, but gave it up when I had few ideas for it - in reality I didn't have enough experience in programming.

It's easy enough to get a handle on the basics. A good IDE (like Borland - I think they're giving it away for free now, so you can use it at home) can help you with auto-completion and the like so that you're not jumping for the reference every five minutes.

Since it's Object-Oriented, most of the Java concepts you learned in college will still apply.

hardCopy

Are you a 3rd year in DCU by any chance?

DublinWriter

While you're at it OP, check out a tool for Delphi called 'Intraweb'.

It's a RAD tool that lets you build interactive web-sites in minutes and makes developing ASP.NET apps under VS look like something out of the stone-age.

It's a shame that Delphi never got wider acceptance. It's been light-years ahead of anything MS ever had in terms of development tools. I think partly the reasoning for this was Borland's disastrous and inept marketing (this is the 3rd time the company have changed their name) and Microsoft's poaching of their top architects.

Many small software companies still actively use Delphi to develop new products.

Endurance Man

hardCopy wrote: »

Are you a 3rd year in DCU by any chance?

Nope, live in NI.

Thanks DublinWriter, will check that out.
Amazing how much you can learn in a week, iv almost finished my first project already . Wasn't anything huge but i picked up a numerous delphi tricks.

Kernel32

DublinWriter wrote: »

While you're at it OP, check out a tool for Delphi called 'Intraweb'.

It's a RAD tool that lets you build interactive web-sites in minutes and makes developing ASP.NET apps under VS look like something out of the stone-age.

It's a shame that Delphi never got wider acceptance. It's been light-years ahead of anything MS ever had in terms of development tools. I think partly the reasoning for this was Borland's disastrous and inept marketing (this is the 3rd time the company have changed their name) and Microsoft's poaching of their top architects.

Many small software companies still actively use Delphi to develop new products.

I would beg to differ a little. My own background goes back to VB3 but I also coded in various versions of Delphi on some big projects and I have extensive .Net experience. I haven't touched Delphi for a couple of years now and I have no particular interest in doing so. It was ok for development and back in the time of VB3/4 it was much farther ahead of Microsoft but it lost it's way. Borland isn't going to do much more with it now. When they bought TogetherSoft they got heavily into the ALM market which is where their focus is now.

Evil Phil

I heard rumours of a Delphi.Net but nothing seemed to come of it. Anybody else hear about it?

Kernel32

Evil Phil wrote: »

I heard rumours of a Delphi.Net but nothing seemed to come of it. Anybody else hear about it?

There was/is a Delphi.Net, there has been multiple versions of it and I have used them. The first version IDE was buggy and pretty slow. On a project I was on with 8 developers all doing Delphi.Net, the entire codebase was eventually converted to C# and moved to Visual Studio due to the Delphi issues. Language wise it was fine, the IDE has many problems though.

DublinWriter

Evil Phil wrote: »

I heard rumours of a Delphi.Net but nothing seemed to come of it. Anybody else hear about it?

You can develop .NET applications as well as regular Win32 apps with the current version of Delphi.

You can get a free version of Delphi from the Borland website. I think it's called 'Turbo Explorer'.

DublinWriter

Evil Phil wrote: »

I heard rumours of a Delphi.Net but nothing seemed to come of it. Anybody else hear about it?

You can develop .NET apps as well as Win32 apps with the current version.

Endurance Man

DublinWriter wrote: »

You can develop .NET applications as well as regular Win32 apps with the current version of Delphi.

You can get a free version of Delphi from the Borland website. I think it's called 'Turbo Explorer'.

Do you have a link to the free copy? That borland site is a maze, can't seem to find it.

dazberry

http://www.turboexplorer.com/

Be warned that as these were all carved from BDS2006 you can only install one "personality" per machine - I think there is a workaround but its not cough "supported".

I've only installed Turbo Delphi (Win32) and the IDE is more like VS2005 than Delphi 7 - took a little bit of getting used to - notably the component palette.

D.