Delphi Community Edition

I’ve just read Jolyon Smith’s post on a Delphi Community Edition. All good stuff, and something I have been clamouring for, for quite a while. The thing is, I don’t think it will happen. Embarcadero are in the business of making money, not giving things away. Incidentally, I think they’d probably make more money in the long run if they did give some things away, but playing the long game can be very difficult.

So here’s a suggestion which is a mix of both the long and short game. I’ve suggested something like this before. Here it is slightly refined.

1. Create a Delphi Community Edition/Turbo Editon, call it what you want, but the most important thing is it’s price. Yep, it’s free, or perhaps even better make it $99. (For some reason people think free stuff equates to poor quality)
2. Do all the things Jolyon suggested. Digital Watermarking for example.
3. Create an app-store on the Embarcadero website, that can accept apps/components from the Community Edition. Embarcadero get a percentage of all sales. (and perhaps they have some utility to remove the watermark when sold through the store)

So users get their cheap edition, but they also get a reason to use it. Why do people put them selves through the hassle of learning Objective-C and Cocoa for the IPhone when it’s arguably easier to develop for Windows Mobile? There’s money in it, that’s why!

Embarcadero get their $99 for the IDE and their 5-10% cut of sales, but more importantly they get a new user. Someone who would have used C# Express Edition, but saw an opportunity. Apple do have the advantage of a closed system, so perhaps it wouldn’t work for Delphi, but Embarcadero would not lose a thing by trying. The developers who currently would buy Delphi Professional, are not the target, and if done right, would still want the Professional version. Your target is that new developer about to download C# Express.

Customer Care

I was browsing Delphi tagged questions in stackoverflow yesterday, when I encountered this question. It’s all about generics in Delphi 2009. Whether they are actually usable. Here are a few clips from the answers :

 

I'm using generics extensively in Delphi 2009, and I can say it's not easy as you are often required to work around an ICE

All this trouble seems to be gone in Delphi 2010

Bottom line: if you want to use them, upgrade to 2010.

 

I have also personally mentioned before that the IDE just doesn’t seem to recognise the existence of generics (try any refactoring or code completion). So basically what we are saying is that if you bought Delphi 2009, and you want to use generics in any meaningful way, you need to fork out more money and get Delphi 2010.

Does anyone else find that disturbing? Let me give you a comparison. Let’s say you have just bought a Dell laptop. It cost about the same as Delphi 2009. The (fictional) Dell Longitude 2009. Among it’s many features, is built-in wifi. When you got the laptop, wifi kind of worked, but the laptop didn’t really recognise it had wifi, and you had to do a lot of manual stuff to get it working. When you did get it working, you noticed in some circumstances, it just refused to work, and in others it only kind of works. You complained to Dell, and they released update 2 and update 3 (some kind of bios update), which made things a lot better, and you were kind of happy. Less than a year later, Dell release the Longitude 2010. It looks like they’re not going to fix the existing wifi problems in the Longitude 2009, but if you have a 2009, they’ll give you a special price on a brand new 2010.

Would you buy Dell again? Would you not expect Dell to fix your Longitude 2009? And if they can’t or won’t, don’t you expect a refund?

I’m not singling out Embarcadero here, it is apparently industry practice. What other industry could get away with it though?

What worries me is that I have to go to my boss and ask to upgrade to Delphi 2010. I am lucky, that I work for a company that has no problems in giving us the latest tools, whatever the cost. And in the grand scheme of things, to even a small company, the price of Delphi is insignificant. However, my boss will definitely ask the question, What does Delphi 2010 give us? I can wax lyrical about increased IDE productivity, and improved RTTI, but at some point I’ll have to add the line. Well, we had a few problems with generics in D2009, but it’s all been sorted out in D2010. What kind of confidence does a line like that instil?

W32/Induc-A are you worried?

Over the last few days there have been a flurry of posts about this virus. I’m not going to repeat what it is or what it does, as I’m sure any self respecting Delphi developer has read the same posts that I have.

Are Embarcadero worried about this development? If not, they should be! (To be fair, they are aware of it, and thinking about it)

It’s all well and good telling us that

1. It only affects Delphi 4-7, so get the latest version!
2. It is a rather benign virus, and doesn’t cause any harm, so don’t worry unduly.

Unfortunately the cat is out of the bag, and you can’t put it back. I think (and somebody correct me if I’m wrong), there is nothing in the current version of Delphi that prevents this being replicated for later versions. My guess is the virus writer is one of those who hasn’t upgraded, and it’s only a matter of time before someone replicates this for Delphi 2009. Secondly, who knows what the next virus might do? This maybe just a warning, the next one may cause untold havoc.

How long before clients start asking what tool we use for our development, and refusing to buy applications written in Delphi. I need to be able to tell clients that this cannot happen with the tool we currently use. Is that even possible?

Time for new project type?

I’m not a web developer. While I did do some classic ASP earlier in my career, it’s mostly been about classic (Delphi) Win32 applications for me. So recently I thought I’d have a look at ASP.NET. At the same time, I thought I’d also have a look at ASP.NET MVC since that seems to be the in thing at the moment. Now I have no bias either way. I’m fairly new to both, but I just loved the simplicity of ASP.NET MVC. I’m not sure if simplicity is the word I need here, because actually, classic ASP.NET is perhaps the easier option for an inexperienced developer, as it uses abstractions to make Web development a drag and drop affair. Still, ASP.NET MVC just felt more natural to me. I’m sure had I looked at it 10-12 years ago (and had ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC been around), I would have loved ASP.NET, and wondered why they even bothered with MVC.

This got me thinking about my day job. Since Delphi 1 we’ve opened up the IDE and clicked on New VCL Forms Application, got our empty form and started dropping components on the surface. We drop a few more components, create a few bindings, write a few event handlers, and hey presto we have an application. I bet every Delphi developer started out that way, and it works, but as you get more experienced, you begin to realise that for any real-world, half decent application, this sort of coding style just doesn’t scale well, and more importantly doesn’t maintain well. So you add a datamodule, and move all your database components to it, and feel happy for all of about 3 minutes. Something still bothers you though, so you get rid of the datamodules, and get rid of the data aware components, and perhaps write a framework, or even get a third party one. You read the book on design patterns, and see how many of them you can fit into your application.

Now that’s all well and good, and your framework may be great, but it’s different than my framework. Actually, I keep changing my framework of choice depending on what article or book I read last. My point is, that there is no consistency. So while the data-aware component model works well for beginners, and I would not advocate getting rid of it, I think Delphi is more than mature enough to have a new model. Sure we can look at third-party vendors for this model, or we can write it ourselves, but if we want real consistency, it needs to be in the IDE right next to Create New VCL Forms Application, and everybody needs to have it in their IDE. That way, when that new developer outgrows the 100 components per form model, and he or she is ready for the next level, there’s a clear path.

So how about it Embarcadero? Perhaps it’s time for Delphi to grow up a bit. I dunno, some kind of MVC pattern perhaps. Perhaps Passive View. Why not more than one? Wouldn’t you like to see this in the menu under File|New

New Passive View Project

Or maybe it’s just me!