Codegear is offering a free trial of Delphi for PHP … for a single day:
Long enough to evaluate a developer product? To my mind this is taking RAD a step too far. Just as well, since, this is what I got when I tried to download it:
This means one of two things. It either demonstrates the huge interest in Delphi for PHP, or the unfortunate lack of scalability in CodeGear’s server applications. Which, it appears, are not coded in PHP.
To be fair, the product has just been slashdotted. The thread is not especially illuminating so far, though I thought this was a telling comment:
For a reference, this is how this looks in plain PHP (granted no MVC and so on, but for the sake of example..):
<?php echo “Hello World” ?>
What does Delphi do?
- Loads several thousand lines VCL code
- Loads all the menu, form, container and “external” controls, although they’re not used (thousands of lines of code)
- The Hello World is a label (no simpler way) which has around 50 properties (color, bg color and what not) defined in an XML file. I left all at defaults, but never mind. The file is loaded, parsed.
- The Label class inherits from CustomLabel, which inherits from Components which inherits from other stuff I didn’t even bother check, it goes through all properties, and figures out after a lot of thinking that it should print the words “Hello World”.
Yes, that’s the trade-off with frameworks, though some are better than others. Now we need some counter-examples. Anyone?
Hey Tim! Thanks for checking it out.
of course you can always just
echo “Hello World”;
😉
Often the examples are just to demonstrate the abilities of the controls, not the best way to accomplish something useful (like Hello World lol). For example the label control is databound, so you can just point it to a field in your table and it will populate, and change as you navigate a dataset… also being a control it has ajax support built in, so it can be updated without page refreshes. It also supports the Stylesheet controls so you can easily set and change styles. It also supports templates so you can have complete separation between your PHP controls and logic and HTML.
I would never use a label just to output some text. Overkill.
Re the 1day trial, thats a temporary trial that we built for a 24hr event we were considering for this week. We decided to go with the Delphi 2007 24hr event instead, since we had the trial on hand anyway, we went ahead and posted it. We have a full 14day trial in the works and will be available shortly.
Thanks for checkin it out!