Microsoft’s Flash alternative has a new name: Silverlight. Undoubtedly a radical shift in naming conventions. Back in 2005, Microsoft renamed Avalon to Windows Presentation Foundation, and I noted that:

These new names seem to be deliberately chosen to be forgettable.

Now we have memorable back. Interesting.

The name may be there, but the product is still in preview; the latest release remains the February CTP, with full release promised before July 2007. The emphasis is on video and vector graphics; there’ s no common language runtime implementation yet. You can write Silverlight code in JavaScript. It’s cross-platform, but currently only supports Windows and Mac; no device support yet. See the faq here for more information; and a useful summary from Tim Sneath who says there is big Silverlight news to come at Mix07.

I tried out Delphi for PHP for the first time this weekend.

Install on Vista was smooth. The setup installs its own copy of Apache 2 and PHP 5. A few minutes later and I was up and running.

The IDE is Delphi-like. Here is a scrunched-up image to give you a flavour:

I have a standard application I build when trying out a new development tool. It is a to-do list with a listbox, a textbox, and buttons to add and remove items from the list. I started well, and soon had the controls placed, though they are tricky to line-up nicely. I resorted to setting the Left property as the snap-to-grid did not work for me.

Then I double-clicked the Add button. As expected, I was greeted with an empty Click handler. What to type? After a little experimentation I came up with this:

$this->lstItems->AddItem($this->ebItem->Text,null,null);

When you type ->, the editor pops up autocomplete choices. Nice. I clicked the run button and the application opened in my web browser. I set a breakpoint on the line; that worked nicely, especially after I displayed the Locals window so I could see the value of variables.

The next step is to implement removing an item. This is fractionally more challenging (I realise this is little more than Hello World), since I need to retrieve the index of the selected item and then work out how to remove it.

I am embarrassed to admit that it took me some time. Yes, I tried the documentation, but it is terrible. Unbelievably bad. Someone ran a thing called Doc-O-Matic over the code. Here’s the entire description of the ListBox control:

A class to encapsulate a listbox control 

There’s also a reference which lists methods, again with a one-line description if you are lucky. Here’s the one for ListBox.getItems:

This is getItems, a member of class ListBox.

I gave up on the docs. I had figured out AddItem; I had discovered that the itemindex property has the index of the selected item; but there is no RemoveItem or DeleteItem. I went back to basics. The ListBox has an _items member field which is an array. In PHP you remove an item from an array with unset. I resorted to editing the VCL for PHP by adding a RemoveAt method to CustomListBox:

function RemoveAt($index)
{
unset($this->_items[$index]);
}

Note that I am not proposing you do the same. There must be a better way to do this. I just couldn’t work it out quickly from the docs; and I was determined to get this up and running.

Here’s my code for removing an item:

$selindex = $this->lstItems->itemindex;

if ( $selindex > -1)
{
$this->lstItems->RemoveAt($selindex);
}

Now my app worked fine. What about deployment? I used the deployment wizard, which essentially copies a bunch of files into a directory, ready for upload. There are a lot. 44 files to be precise, mostly of course the VCL for PHP. Still, it was painless, and you can configure a web server to share these files between different applications.

All I needed to test it was a web server running PHP 5.x (it will not work with PHP 4). Fortunately I had one available, so I uploaded my first Delphi for PHP application. It looked good, but although it worked on my local machine, the deployed app throws an error when you click a button:

Application raised an exception class Exception with message ‘The Input Filter PHP extension is not setup on this PHP installation, so the contents returned by Input is *not* filtered’

I note that this user has the same problem. My hunch is that Delphi for PHP requires PHP 5.2 – I only have 5.1 at the moment.*

In addition, I don’t like the way the default deployment handles errors, by publishing my callstack to the world, complete with the location of the files on my web server.

How secure are all these VCL for PHP files anyway? What assurance do I have about this? Will they be patched promptly if security issues are discovered?

Important questions.

There will be plenty more to say about Delphi for PHP. For the moment I’m reserving judgment. I will say that the release looks rushed, which is a shame.

Update: I’ve now seen a fix posted to the Borland newsgroups for the input filter exception, showing how to remove the code which raises it. However I suggest you do not apply this fix, for security reasons, unless you are deploying on a trusted intranet. It is vital to sanitize PHP input on the internet.

*PHP 5.2 is not the answer. It could even be a problem. Delphi for PHP ships with PHP 5.1. There is an input filter extension which you can add for PHP 5.x; see http://pecl.php.net/package/filter. However these are built into PHP 5.2; but the version used by VCL for PHP is old and seems to be incompatible. What a mess.

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?

1. Loads several thousand lines VCL code
2. Loads all the menu, form, container and “external” controls, although they’re not used (thousands of lines of code)
3. 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.
4. 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?