Dimensional Data

The final build time metric in the “Discovering The Best Cross-Platform Framework Through Benchmarking” whitepaper measures the total amount of time required for the framework to produce the final build for the benchmark application. The whitepaper evaluates two frameworks supporting multi-platform desktop application development: Delphi and Electron. This is the fourth in a series of blog posts looking more closely at each of the 26 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: Developer Productivity Developer productivity is the measure of effort and code required for developers to complete typical development tasks. Productivity directly impacts product time-to-market and long-term labor costs so tools that increase developer productivity have substantial impacts on business timelines and bottom lines. Productivity can be realized in two distinct ways – reduced coding requirements due to native libraries, and IDE tools like code-completion and visual design.IDEs with greater library breadth generally result in fewer lines of code per application and produce a clean, lean codebase that minimizes opportunities for bugs or maintenance problems later in the product life cycle. Benchmark Metric 4/26: Final Build Time Final Build Time: Total hours required to “speedrun” the application using a known solution. This measures the number of actions and volume of code required to complete the full application by an expert developer with perfect knowledge of a working solution. Productive frameworks reduce development time on repetitive but slightly altered tasks. Benchmarking Results Delphi Score: 5 (out of 5) Electron Score: 3 (out of 5) Once complete, the Electron application was “speedrun” in half the time of the Delphi application despite requiring almost twice as many lines of developer-typed code. This is largely because Delphi’s IDE provides visual application development [P2] through drag-and-drop components, decreasing the complexity of GUI creation at the cost of increased time configuring components. Delphi exhibited strength in other areas, however. Its database and network code composed only 46% of developer-typed lines compared to 61% for Electron, a clear indication that Delphi’s FireDAC database library and network tools abstract those operations better than Node.JS, reducing developer effort and opportunities for error. Overall, similar results in the initial development phase made Delphi and Electron appear equivalent. This conclusion changed after amending the specification to add internal unit tests. Once the contractors sufficiently understood the test requirements, the Delphi application was modified andaccepted in 8.33 hours of work. The Electron application, on the other hand, took 47.8 hours to add the same functionality. Although the Electron developer implemented the test features in his development environment within 28.6 hours, troubleshooting a variety of Javascript and database library errors occurring on the client machines (Windows, macOS, Linux) nearly doubled the delivery time of the amended RSS reader to 47.8 hours. Download the complete whitepaper here

Code size is a simple metric that compares the number of lines of code required to create the benchmark application in the study. The “Discovering The Best Cross-Platform Framework Through Benchmarking” whitepaper evaluates two frameworks supporting multi-platform desktop application development: Delphi and Electron. This is the fifth in a series of blog posts looking more closely at each of the 26 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: Developer Productivity Developer productivity is the measure of effort and code required for developers to complete typical development tasks. Productivity directly impacts product time-to-market and long-term labor costs so tools that increase developer productivity have substantial impacts on business timelines and bottom lines. Productivity can be realized in two distinct ways – reduced coding requirements due to native libraries, and IDE tools like code-completion and visual design.IDEs with greater library breadth generally result in fewer lines of code per application and produce a clean, lean codebase that minimizes opportunities for bugs or maintenance problems later in the product life cycle. Framework productivity was evaluated according to six metrics that sought to capture howframeworks and IDEs improve product time-to-market. Benchmark Metric 5/26: Code Size Code Size: Total lines of code the developer must write, adhering to accepted formatting and styles, to create a fully functional application. This objective measure of code volume sheds light on the difficulty of future code maintenance – more code typically requires more time to learn and troubleshoot. Benchmarking Results Delphi Score: 5 (out of 5) The Delphi FMX RSS reader required 178 lines of typed code total and 97 lines for the GUI (54%). Electron Score: 3 (out of 5) The Electron RSS reader required 293 lines of typed code total and 115 lines for the GUI (39%). Download the complete whitepaper here

On 12 January Serge Pilko, Embarcadero MVP and founder of Softacom, a world leading Delphi software development services and software solutions provider, published a video of his interview with Alister Christie, author of the legendary “Code Faster in Delphi” and the creator of hundreds of videos that have shown many of today’s Delphi developers around the world how to program and accomplish things with Delphi. Download Code Faster in Delphi for free here Alister also has an upcoming book, “Code Better in Delphi”, scheduled to hit bookstores soon. We have chosen to publish the transcript of their conversation in a three-part series of blog posts, of which this is the second. Read the first part here Alister Christie And Serge Pilko Talk Delphi, Part 2 of 3 Serge For me, because I am also creating some content for me, it’s interesting. Where are you getting your ideas for your videos nowadays? Because… Alister Sometimes it’s just, you know, I’ll stumble across something that’s interesting. So now we might make a video on it. Other times, you know.. sometimes YouTube comments, a source of video content. Serge Okay. Alister Or maybe someone else’s blog, post an idea for something. Serge Do you have any personal messages from people? For example, you posted some video, then they are trying to reach you somehow. I don’t know. Alister Yeah. I get, you know, a fair number of comments, Youtube comments, and occasionally I’ll get messaged. Quite often, LinkedIn is often the best way to get in touch with me. I’m Allister Christy on that. Serge Are you answering their questions? Because for example, sometimes we are posting something about Delphi and FireMonkey, and we have a lot of haters for Delphi, saying “stop, you’re providing wrong ideas, it’s dead, stop, you’re a liar. I’m just ignoring such kinds of comments. Alister I tend to get much negative. I often get comments that I talk too fast, which I definitely do, and I can’t help it. This is just my normal talking speed. I try to slow down a little bit for recording videos, but it can be hard to concentrate on so many different things when recording. Yeah, that one gets lost, I just end up talking fast, but yeah. ideas.  Yeah. Like the Deepstack one that was just, you know, I saw that Blue Iris, which is a security software I used was using it for doing object detection for providing alerts. And I thought “that obviously has an API. I wonder if you can access it in Delphi”, and of course, you know, has a  REST…, so it was pretty trivial to work it out. Serge Your format, like short videos, you think this is the best way for getting information or it’s more convenient for you? For example, for me, it’s not easy to find and prepare a huge video to deeply explain some subject. What about you? Because for you it’s easy, or you think it’s useful for the people, because they want long videos, because…? Alister Yeah, I, most, most of my videos are short. I mean, I’ve had to do DelphiCon, Coderage and that kind of stuff, and they took about an hour, 45 minutes to an hour, maybe half an hour. And usually, to produce an hour of […]

Designing a well-crafted and easily manageable software system is the ultimate goal of any professional developer. Therefore, we need the best windows development tool and coding practices to achieve this goal. Clean coding is one such core practice that can help us in our mission. However, unfortunately, many new developers are not even aware of clean coding. So, let us briefly discuss clean coding methods and their relationship to the best windows development tool, Delphi. What is clean code? By definition, clean code is well crafted, easy to understand, and easy to change because change is inevitable in any usable software. To change a software system, we need to understand it. If the code is poorly written and messy, it would not be cost-effective to change it. On the other hand, if code follows a well-thought structure, is well organized, and is easily understandable, it is clean code. What are the basic concepts of clean code windows development? Clean coding is a discipline in itself now. Here is a brief overview of some basic concepts of clean coding. Why is code duplication bad? Clean code does not repeat itself because code duplication generates many problems, from bug fixing to updating and maintenance. What is the “boy scout” rule? Always leave the code in a better state than you found it. If you always check out with a little bit better code, then the quality and clarity of your codebase will increase over time. On the other hand, if you do not follow this rule, the code will rote over time, and it will be a nightmare to maintain. Do you have empathy? Show that you care about the person who will read your code. For example, I once saw that the previous electrician marked a wire with a sticker in electrical wiring. It was a good help for the new electrician to understand and repair the circuit. Both of us were thankful for this act of kindness of the previous electrician. Why is naming so important? A code is full of variables, constants, methods, arguments, classes, directories, etc. If a developer takes some time and care in naming these entities, it will drastically increase the readability of the code. There will not be a need for many comments to explain these variables. Choose a name that clearly describes their purpose, functionality, and usage when naming your entities. What is the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP)? If a function or class does more than one thing, you have not designed it well. On the other hand, making an entity do only one thing well improves its readability, usability, and changeability. How many function parameters are ideal? Single parameter functions and procedures are ideal. However, you can increase this limit by up to three parameters. You should pass an object instead of many parameters for anything above that. This arrangement will improve readability, and it is easier to change if necessary. Are you directly using numbers and strings? If a code uses a value like ’33’ or ‘m’ in assignments, it is challenging to guess its purpose. Therefore, you should name these as constants and then use those constants in all assignments. With this arrangement, if you need to change it in the future, you can easily do it in one place only. […]

A control or component is a user interface (UI) element that displays content or enables interaction. Components are the building blocks of the user interface. A ‘pattern’ is a recipe for combining several controls to make something new. This article gives a guide for Windows UI development and design guidance for better UI development with modern Windows UI toolkits. The Delphi VCL and FMX frameworks have dozens of built-in controls for you to use, ranging from various simple buttons to powerful data components like the list view grid view. Moreover, the form designer and the LiveBindings designer in RAD Studio provide a great environment to create a bold, scalable UI that looks great on all devices and screen sizes. Delphi VCL & FMX Delphi’s RAD Studio IDE offers a WYSIWYG design experience with drag-and-drop components for visual GUI design. Let’s suppose you choose the FireMonkey (FMX) framework for building GUI apps? In that case, the designed GUI can be viewed using native Android, iOS, Windows, macOS styling, or custom styles and can simulate app appearances within mobile devices of varying screen sizes. But we have another library called Visual Component Library that creates actual native Windows-based applications with direct access to the hardware. You can benefit from pure native device hardware performance.  Delphi’s VCL has been in active development for more than two and a half decades. At least one application in your Windows device is built with Delphi and Visual Component Library. For instance, KMPlayer, WinRAR, MySQL Admin Tools, AIMP, BurnAware, Dev-C++, EarMaster, FL Studio, Nero Burning Rom, Ultra ISO, Total Commander, TeamSpeak, Hamachi (Gamers know it well), Age of Wonders, and many more applications.  Applications built with Delphi VCL give an authentic, native experience with high performance. The VCL includes a robust OpenTools API and component model making it easy for others to extend the IDE and build reusable components and libraries. That’s why you can see a massive pool of 3rd party component markets. This creates a robust environment for developers to make any application. Microsoft Windows has several design systems that you can follow to create GUI apps. For example, Windows Classic Design, Luna and Aero designs, Microsoft Metro, and the latest and most loved one is the Microsoft Fluent Design System. Fluent Design is used as a guideline for all Windows 10/11 devices, and transition to Fluent is a gradual long-term project. The Fluent Design System preserves the clean look and feels with blurred translucency. With Delphi VCL, you can turn your Windows Classic applications into Fluent Design using styles. Furthermore, it can alter any part of the UI element to something unique. Delphi VCL and FMX components can also be resized and have their properties adjusted in the Object Inspector without touching code, allowing rapid prototyping through visual development. Windows UI or just WinUI is Microsoft Windows’ native layer. Most of the new Windows development tools are utilizing it to create an environment to build desktop apps with their technologies. WinUI contains controls and fluent design systems that designers and developers need to develop Windows applications. WinUI is the latest GUI framework such as WinForms, WPF, and UWP. We can say that WinUI has improved over the years and got all the experiences from other frameworks like UWP XAML apps. For instance, WinUI 2 contains […]