What development platforms do Delphi and Election support? On this benchmarking metric Electron’s flexibility puts it ahead of Delphi. In the blog post below we take a closer look at the development platforms Delphi and Electron support as part of the broader Benchmarking study and accompanying whitepaper.

The “Discovering The Best Cross-Platform Framework Through Benchmarking” whitepaper evaluates two frameworks supporting multi-platform desktop application development: Delphi and Electron.

Delphi

Delphi, encapsulated in the Rapid Application Development (RAD) Studio IDE, is Embarcadero Technologies’ flagship product. A proprietary version of the Object Pascal language, Delphi features graphical application development with “drag and drop” components, a WYSIWYG viewer for most mobile platforms, and robust style options including platform-standard and unique palettes that provide a fully customized look and feel. Among other features, included libraries provide GUI controls, database access managers, and direct access target platform hardware and platform operating systems. The Delphi FireMonkey (FMX) framework will compile projects to native code for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, and Linux, allowing users to develop and maintain one codebase reaching most of the market. Delphi has been available for over 25 years.

Electron

Electron is an open-source (MIT License), Chromium-based framework that utilizes web technologies to build desktop applications on Windows, macOS, and Linux. It is developed and maintained by GitHub, a subsidiary of Microsoft. Electron combines the Chromium-based rendering engine with a Node.js server environment. As such, the user interface for an Electron application is available via HTML5 and CSS. Generally, Electron works with most Javascript frameworks such as Angular, Vue.js, and React. The HTML5, CSS, and Javascript-based technologies found in Chromium provide a rich ecosystem of user customization familiar to any web developer. Despite its relatively young age of five years, its community boasts open source packages for database access, operating system interactions, and other common tasks.

26 Benchmarking Metrics

This is the ninth in a 26-part series of blog posts looking more closely at each of the individual metrics used in the study, and how Delphi and Electron each fared on these metrics. The first can be found here.

Download the complete whitepaper here

Benchmark Category: Functionality

Functionality Framework functionality was examined qualitatively through research on the business aspects of each framework ranging from initial investment through long-term maintenance of the products created. Business functionality refers to a framework’s business suitability and impact on long-term plans. Excellent functionality allows companies to easily build custom tools or extensions, develop on a platform of their choosing, protect their source code from exploitation, and have confidence that their applications will be maintainable for decades.

Benchmark Metric 9/26: Supported Development Platforms

Supported Development Platforms: Can application development occur on any major operating system or does the framework IDE impose limitations? This metric indicates how a framework may hinder a team without homogenous equipment.

Benchmarking Results

Delphi Score: 2 (out of 5)

Delphi can only be developed within RAD Studio on Windows machines. Virtualization solutions such as VMware, Parallels, and Virtual Box with a virtual Windows machine can facilitate Delphi development on other platforms.

Electron Score: 5 (out of 5)

Electron can be developed on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Download the complete whitepaper here

---

---