Dimensional Data

While the idea of integrated development environments (IDE software) dates back to 1983 when Borland launched TurboPascal, the first-ever editor-compiler integration, many believe the IDE wave really started with Microsoft’s Visual Basic and Delphi in the 1990s. Long vbefore even those early days, early developers would save their code on a variety of hard-copy mediums such as the IBM punch card machine o,r punched paper tape, turn it in over to a machine/computer operator, and wait, sometimes for hours, for the printout to return before the developer would know whether or not their program was successful and if, it was, what the output generated looked like. The next generation was an improvement, with such advances as time-sharing terminals, where the software developer could save their code on a remote computer The programmer still often had to wait several hours before their code could be compiled, executed and the results arrive back. Luckily things progressed rapidly until the advent of the personal computer era meant we developers could write, compile and execute our code all on one machine with the immediate gratification if it worked – or woe and angst when it didn’t. Did the rise of the Internet make IDEs essential? However, the explosive growth of the internet accelerated the need for rapid application development (RAD); developers and businesses sought ways to abstract their ideas to higher languages, develop and deploy software faster, and ultimately become more productive. The success of Microsoft Windows highly graphical user interface offered – and demanded – solutions which were more instant and where the visual elements of the program’s user interface could be seen while designing, prior to deployment Hence the advent of Visual Basic and Delphi IDEs where screen design was WYSIWYG and a more tactile, responsive, intuitive experience. Developers could now think of code in graphical terms and visually design applications by leveraging the drag and drop feature in these IDEs. While the development of the first Windows IDEs was met with great enthusiasm from developers, how they were treated will quickly pale in comparison to how we treat a Windows IDE today.  What are the key elements of an IDE? Continuous advancement in technology has brought about massive improvements to the Windows IDEs. Over the years, we have seen integrated environments with features such as; Programmable editors Code refactoring engines Team collaboration systems Object and data modeling Build environments Debuggers Unit testing  Static and dynamic program analysis. Do Windows IDEs target Android/IOS/macOS/Linux and Windows? With advances in technology, the Windows IDE now targets not just apps for Windows but also those of Android, iOS, macOS and Linux. For example, Delphi can compile to native 32-bit or 64-bit code for Windows using the VCL framework and compile to 32-bit or 64-bit code for Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, and Linux using the FMX framework. The key takeaway here is that all the apps are native apps not some kind of bloated interpretive virtual app environment framework. The native close to the metal nature of Delphi and C++ Builder apps means they run at the full speed of the underlying hardware with almost nothing between the device’s internals other than the operating system. This means they are scary fast and ridiculously reliable with great resistance to operating system changes in shared components that brings about […]

When businesses choose a software framework they begin a long-term relationship for the duration of their application’s lifecycle. Given the strategic consequences of this decision, businesses must carefully consider how frameworks enhance developer productivity, business functionality,application flexibility, product performance, the long-term viability of that framework, and the inherent security in each framework’s design and technology. The ideal framework demonstrates strength in each category by minimizing product time-to-market, reducing maintenance costs, supporting product variety, and facilitating a superior customer experience. 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 first 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. 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 1/26: Development Time Development Time Metric: Total hours spent writing the fully functional application from scratch. This measurement assesses the value a framework’s productivity tools add to an average developer with no prior task knowledge. Comprehensive documentation, plentiful native libraries, code completion, and other IDE tools will allow the developer to design and build the benchmark application more efficiently than would be the case in a “standard” text editor. Benchmarking Results Delphi Score: 3 (out of 5) One expert Delphi developer completed the Unicode Reader in 23.3 hours using the RAD Studio IDE. Application modification with internal tests took 8.33 hours for a total development time of 31.63 hours. Five other Delphi developers gave estimates for the original application ranging from 24 to 50 hours, averaging 38.8 hours. Electron Score: 5 (out of 5) One expert Electron developer completed the Unicode Reader in 20 hours using Angular for the RSS reader GUI and node-postgres, a collection of node.js modules, for the database interactions. However, application modification with internal tests took an additional 47.8 hours – 28.6 hours to code the tests and 19.2 hours to troubleshoot issues on three platforms until acceptance criteria were met – for a total of 67.8 hours. Three other Electron estimates for the Unicode Reader ranged from 80 to 120 hours with a mean of 100 hours. Download the complete whitepaper here

When businesses choose a software framework they begin a long-term relationship for the duration of their application’s lifecycle. Given the strategic consequences of this decision, businesses must carefully consider how frameworks enhance developer productivity, business functionality,application flexibility, product performance, the long-term viability of that framework, and the inherent security in each framework’s design and technology. The ideal framework demonstrates strength in each category by minimizing product time-to-market, reducing maintenance costs, supporting product variety, and facilitating a superior customer experience. 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 second 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 1/26: UI Design Approach UI Design Approach Metric: Does the framework’s IDE allow for graphical/visual application creation and provide a “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) view model?11 IDEs that support development through “drag and drop” components or other visual methods allow users to engage different methods of thought and creativity as they work. Visual creation through WYSIWYG editors preclude businesses from needing every version of physical hardware to view platform-native styling. Benchmarking Results Delphi Score: 5 (out of 5) Delphi’s RAD Studio IDE offers a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) design experience with drag-and-drop components for visual GUI design. The designed GUI can be viewed using native Android/iOS/Windows/macOS styling or custom styles and can simulate application appearances within mobile devices of varying screen sizes. Components can also be resized and have their properties adjusted in the Object Inspector without touching code, allowing rapid prototyping through visual development. Delphi also offers the ability for a developer to edit the UI using a simple YAML style language definition. Electron Score: 3 (out of 5) Electron lacks a native IDE but can be developed using text editors and command line tools, Electron doesn’t include a WYSIWYG design experience or drag-and-drop components by default. The UI can be created using HTML5 and CSS styling. Unless the developer chooses an IDE like Visual Studio, Electron applications must be compiled and run to view the project’s GUI. Download the complete whitepaper here

AI is one of the most significant trends in the app development industry. We can witness that artificial intelligence is coursing into every regular activity of ours whether it is medicine, finance, production, cyber security through mobile and desktop applications. In this article, you will learn how to transform your Windows development as well as that of other desktops such macOS or Linux, or for mobile applications by harnessing the power of artificial intelligence using Embarcadero’s Delphi FireMonkey technology. Artificial intelligence empowers you and your business to achieve more by providing intelligent solutions to complex problems. Delphi is a strongly typed, event-driven programming language with a rich ecosystem of frameworks and components. With the Delphi FireMonkey framework, you can build native and cross-platform applications from a single code base, and you can easily target: Windows iOS Android macOS Linux Web   Should I use AI in my Windows and mobile apps? There is a trend in Microsoft Windows desktop applications towards using AI. For instance, the Cortana visual assistant can improve and become more helpful over time if you use it. Moreover, the Microsoft Office applications can learn what you do and give recommendations and fixes to your document. The Outlook email and calendar management app has recently incorporated some great use of machine learning to send out an innovative summary of tasks on which you have promised a follow-up. It’s becoming obvious that you should definitely consider using machine learning and AI in your apps to add powerful and innovative additional functionality. Microsoft also provides Cognitive Services that allow AI, specifically machine learning, algorithms to be deployed on the powerful and popular Azure cloud computing. You can easily connect your Delphi FireMonkey apps to these cognitive services.  By using cloud-provided AI APIs, you can spend more time building your business logic rather than creating the needed service from scratch. 1. Use Google Cloud AI APIs Google offers a variety of AI APIs that you can easily connect to Google’s online services and accomplish machine learning tasks in the cloud and fetch the data using REST endpoints. For instance, Google Document AI API is one such service which provides the ability to parse structured information from unstructured or semi-structured documents using state-of-the-art Google AI such as natural language, computer vision, translation, and AutoML. Google Vision AI API is another set of services that you can utilize to detect objects or extract text from the document with world-class accuracy. Here you can check out this tutorial which shows you how to deploy powerful AI vision tools on Windows and Mobile. 2. Integrate APILayer AI APIs APILayer is one of the market-leading services that offer a wide variety of productivity-boosting Web APIs, cloud-based micro-service applications for developers and companies of any size. LanguageLayer is part of the APILayer set, and it provides powerful language detection AI API. It supports 173 languages and you can access this service via REST API. Here is a tutorial where you can learn how to integrate this LanguageLayer API into your Delphi FireMonkey application. 3. Integrate DeepAI APIs You can integrate DeepAI APIs into your Delphi applications. So, you can use DeepAI API to process images and videos to get data about the demographics of people present, faces detected. Moreover, you even flag media that contains nudity so […]

Java was developed by Sun Microsystems and was later acquired by Oracle in 1995. According to its Wikipedia page, “Java is a high-level, class-based, object-oriented programming language, designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible.” Although it has been one of the most widely used programming languages over the years, there have been many questions and discussions surrounding java’s viability to date, not just for development on windows but in a more general sense too. There are countless discussions such as; Is Java dead? Is it now a language of the past? Should we now look elsewhere for development tools and if we do, what are the best alternatives to Java? Is Java Really Dead? When Java was first introduced in 1995, it was the ‘real deal’. Java songs were sung all across the programming world. Sun Microsystems was giving off Microsoft vibes, and James Gossling (original java developer at Suns) was the kingpin of Silicon Valley. So, what has changed? Java is an established programming language with many use cases. However, while there’s much debate around whether it is declining or not, it is certainly not growing at any real pace. When you consider that this is a constantly evolving industry, you begin to notice that java is living in the past.  If you take a look at the TIOBE index, you’ll discover that Java has been on a steady decline glide slope since 2016. In fact, between May 2016 to May 2017, the Java programming language declined by 6% in ratings. Moreover, in the latest index rating, java has dropped from the number one spot to number three in the last five years; Considering its very large community, that says a lot.  Did Google really kill Java? What’s more, when Google dropped support for NPAPI (Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface) from its 2015 Chrome browser releases this put a serious downward pressure on Java’s adoption and started a negative inflection point. NPAPI is an API which the Java plugin for web browsers relies on. In September 2013, Google announced that it would be phasing out support for the NPAPI for many reasons, some of which were security and browser speed-related. At this point, the developer community was anxious about how Oracle would respond. Instead of providing a more secure Java experience Oracle recommended that users looking to access Java applications via browsers should drop Chrome for Internet Explorer or Safari. Objectively, this was not a reassuring experience for Java programmers especially since the choice of Java was often influenced by the much-touted concept of Java being able to run ‘anywhere’ and now the official guidance seemed to be saying “runs anywhere, as long as it’s not the most popular web browser in the World“. Is Java the COBOL of the online programming world? A few years ago, it was common to see Java referred to as “the new COBOL,” a language whose relevance lies in maintaining clunky legacy corporate in-house systems. Like COBOL, Java is a good language for its time; however, there are better ones. Some of which have emerged over the years to become very relevant and keep pace with the changes and modernization of hardware and operating system advances. Although there’ve been numerous Java updates – and a quite confusing array of Java variants […]

When businesses choose a software framework they begin a long-term relationship for the duration of their application’s lifecycle. Given the strategic consequences of this decision, businesses must carefully consider how frameworks enhance developer productivity, business functionality,application flexibility, product performance, the long-term viability of that framework, and the inherent security in each framework’s design and technology. The ideal framework demonstrates strength in each category by minimizing product time-to-market, reducing maintenance costs, supporting product variety, and facilitating a superior customer experience. 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 second 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 1/26: UI Design Approach UI Design Approach Metric: Does the framework’s IDE allow for graphical/visual application creation and provide a “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) view model?11 IDEs that support development through “drag and drop” components or other visual methods allow users to engage different methods of thought and creativity as they work. Visual creation through WYSIWYG editors preclude businesses from needing every version of physical hardware to view platform-native styling. Benchmarking Results Delphi Score: 5 (out of 5) Delphi’s RAD Studio IDE offers a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) design experience with drag-and-drop components for visual GUI design. The designed GUI can be viewed using native Android/iOS/Windows/macOS styling or custom styles and can simulate application appearances within mobile devices of varying screen sizes. Components can also be resized and have their properties adjusted in the Object Inspector without touching code, allowing rapid prototyping through visual development. Delphi also offers the ability for a developer to edit the UI using a simple YAML style language definition. Electron Score: 3 (out of 5) Electron lacks a native IDE but can be developed using text editors and command line tools, Electron doesn’t include a WYSIWYG design experience or drag-and-drop components by default. The UI can be created using HTML5 and CSS styling. Unless the developer chooses an IDE like Visual Studio, Electron applications must be compiled and run to view the project’s GUI. Download the complete whitepaper here

In the world of Delphi, Alister Christie needs no introduction. He is the author of the legendary “Code Faster in Delphi”, and the creator of hundreds of videos that showed 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. In the video at the base of this post, Alister has a conversation with Serge Pilko, an equally accomplished Embarcadero MVP and founder of Softacom, a world leading Delphi software development services and software solutions provider. Serge interviews Alister about his career beginnings and first contact with Delphi, and discovers how Alister became a household name among Delphi fans with his educational books and videos through LearnDelphi.tv In this first of a three-part blog series we have published the first part of Alister’s interview with Serge. The next two parts of the interview will be published in the coming weeks as we approach Delphi’s 27th anniversary. To watch the entire video of Serge’s Pilko’s conversation with Alister, scroll to the base of this post. Alister Christie And Serge Bilko Talk Delphi, Part 1 of 3 Serge Pilko Hello everyone. Today I have a guest, Alister Christie. I think you know this guy, because if you are a Delphi developer, for sure you saw his short and very useful videos about Delphi development. Hi Alister.. Alister Christie Hi… Serge Just a couple of words about today’s… let’s say event. In this media we are talking to Alister, as I already said a developer and Embarcadero MVP. Let’s say that today it will be an MVP-to-MVP talk. And of course, Allister is Embarcadero MVP, tutor and speaker on different events about Delphi. And of course he has his famous YouTube channel. I think it’s one of the leading places where developers can watch and get different useful information for them. And of course, learn Delphi programming and development. In this video we are not going to discuss deep tech stuff because we don’t have the time and this is not the goal of this video. In this video we’ll discuss our and Allister’s professional way and where he’s getting his passion, how he’s creating his videos. How is it? Because I think it’s very interesting for our audience. Is it okay for you Allister? Alister Absolutely, yeah. Serge So in this case, my first question to you before we start our plan is “how do you think, where is Delphi today? What do you think? What’s the future? What’s the current status, and do you have any thoughts about this? Alister I think things are looking pretty good for Delphi at the moment. I was a bit worried initially when Idera first acquired Embarcadero, they seem to make some pretty fast decisions on, you know, what staff they wanted to keep and that kind of stuff. And what have you. But I think they’ve kind of realized that Delphi’s pretty good and are putting investment in R and D and all that kind of stuff into it now, which is, is that all very positive? So I think, yeah, in terms of the health of Delphi it’s pretty good. Yeah, a few people […]