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Do Delphi and Election offer testing support? Do they ship with testing libraries, or use external testing libraries? The Delphi and Electron Benchmarking study takes a look at the testing support offered by the two software development frameworks. 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 10/26: Testing Support Testing Support: Does the framework ship with a testing suite, test coverage analysis, and runtime monitoring capability? Benchmarking Results Delphi Score: 4 (out of 5) Delphi ships with the DUnitX unit testing package but lacks a native integration testing system. Numerous 3rd party unit and integration testing tools are available but may not be free. Electron Score: 4 (out of 5) Electron does not install with a native unit or integration testing package. Open-source projects and libraries are available for both functions. Download the complete whitepaper here

It’s hard to ignore the huge success that Microsoft has had in encouraging users to adopt Windows. Even today with competition from Linux, macOS and even more esoteric device choices such as Chromebooks with their ChromeOS Microsoft Windows is the overwhelmingly dominant choice for both business and home users. Whatever platform you target as a developer, the goal is always the same, creating practical, successful applications. Achieving that in the most optimal way requires carefully picking the best Windows tools for developers. Developers want consistent, proven, reliable tools to create applications. Microsoft has created many different tools and libraries to accomplish all these things. There are currently three paths if you choose the Microsoft stack. These are WPF, WinForms, and UWP.  If you have been following our articles, you might know that there is a benchmark where Embarcadero MVPs and expert developers built a calculator app with different technologies. This benchmark illustrated the average time to complete the assigned task and considered extended metrics such user-friendliness and as a result was also able to consider the general productivity is engendered in the developer. In other words, picking the right development tools and IDE software enhanced the optimal overall productivity of the software developer. In summary, Delphi showed that you could build applications way faster in comparison to Electron and WPF technologies. Moreover, Delphi provides more security in Windows applications and no need for a runtime which greatly enhanced its stability. Check out these articles to learn more about the benchmarks Win32 (Windows API) with Delphi and C++ The Windows API or Win32 API allows applications to use the components of Windows. Win32 API is the best and only choice if you need to achieve the highest performance or efficiency, access native OS features, or target other technologies like DirectX. Why is Win32 API the best choice? Win32 API allows you to achieve the best performance for your app by taking direct control over memory allocation and performance-oriented CPU features like SSE or AVX instructions.  Moreover, you can directly access DirectX technologies for low-level high-performance graphics access.  Delphi’s VCL uses Win32 API and other Windows native libraries to produce an application, and that is why you get a swift product. Since C++ Builder also utilizes VCL, you can achieve that performance if you build your applications with C++ Builder.  Furthermore, Visual Component Library is one of the best libraries to build Windows applications because it is stable, reliable, and up-to-date with new Windows features. Can RAD Studio Delphi and C++Builder create apps 5x faster? Use RAD Studio’s award-winning VCL framework for Windows and FireMonkey (FMX) visual framework to create cross-platform responsive UIs. Use VCL Styles at design time! Prototype stylish UIs even faster by seeing immediately at design-time how your styled forms and controls will look when running. FireMonkey design-time guidelines: Prototype quickly with visible lines and enhanced margin and padding support. Here are our latest tutorials on improving Windows applications in 2022 and a beginner’s guide for Windows UI toolkits. Be sure to check them out and follow us here to learn more about other excellent Windows app development tools! Are you looking for a lightweight but powerful C++ development environment?? Tens of millions know Dev-C++ of developers. It is one of the best-known lightweight ideas in the market. Dev-C++ […]

Embarcadero is pleased to announce the release of RAD Studio 11 Alexandria Release 1, also known as RAD Studio 11.1, along with Delphi 11.1 and C++Builder 11.1.  The RAD Studio 11.1 Alexandria release enhances the great features introduced in RAD Studio 11, with a focus on usability, performance and stability improvements. It also includes some new functionality, including new database drivers. Additionally, the RAD Studio 11.1 release offers official support to operating systems released after 11.0 shipped: Windows 11, macOS 12 Monterey, iOS 15, and Android 12. Delphi also switches to a new debugger technology on some of the platforms. In this blog post, we want to highlight some of the main new features and enhancements in RAD 11.1, covering the most relevant quality updates. IDE Improvements The RAD Studio IDE is the primary focus of the 11.1 release, with the goal of rounding up the features introduced in recent versions: Extensive High DPI IDE quality, plus improved use of the IDE with Remote Desktop  Improvements with High DPI designers for VCL and FireMonkey and the styled VCL form designer The new Welcome Page introduced in 11.0 now offers background images and supports adding custom frames with a new Open Tools API GetIt Library Manager enhancements with cached images and a reworked UI implementation (based on the VCL TControlList component) There are also a few new IDE features: The Messages view uses different colors for compiler errors, messages, and hints to better highlights issues (the colors can be customized) The new Items dialog shows the available platforms for each item The Compile dialog shows the platform and build configuration used by the current compilation Code Insight Across Delphi and C++Builder Another significant quality focus area of RAD Studio 11.1 is Code Insight for both languages, Delphi and C++. The C++ language Code Insight implementation, which is based on the Language Server Protocol architecture and cquery, was improved in terms of quality and performance. This is an area we are actively working on and for which we might release a new focused update soon. The Delphi LSP engine saw big performance improvements, with most projects loading and updating error insight from 5 times to 30 times faster. Other changes include type parameters being shown when completing a class declaration, including T in a generic declaration, and showing set types.  Compilers and Debuggers The Delphi and C++ compilers for the various platforms were improved in terms of stability and performance. The Delphi and C++Builder window compilers have additional support for ASLR, DEP/NX, and TSAWARE platform security settings, which are now enabled by default. The RAD Studio binaries and runtime packages are now built with these settings enabled. Regarding debuggers, beside general quality work, the Delphi macOS 64-bit ARM debugger and the Delphi Android 64-bit debugger are now based on the LLDB debugger architecture, which was already in use for the Delphi iOS 64-bit debugger. The intent is to unify the Delphi debuggers on this technology, for most of the supported platforms, as a way to deliver increasingly better quality over time. Moreover, the C++ STL and RTL improved their quality, including better Delphi RTL integration (for example, improving dynamic arrays with STL iterators). RTL, UI, and Database Libraries In the 11.1 Release the core Delphi RTL had several optimizations and quality improvements. There […]

Delphi RTL (Runtime Library) contains a mighty expression engine, one of the foundations of the LiveBindings architecture but can be utilized as a separate engine for processing expressions. It’s this kind of low-code super-charged feature which makes you really appreciate the powerful performance boost that having decent IDE software can add to your coding experience. The LiveBindings for VCL and FireMonkey Delphi and C++ apps were introduced in RAD Studio XE2. It dramatically improved over the years as the technology matured by offering a progression of increasingly powerful features. The LiveBindings Designer lets you visually create and edit LiveBindings. The LiveBindings Wizard takes you through the steps to develop new LiveBindings expressions and make connections between existing and new components. The PrototypeBindSource provides a data source for generating sample data that you can use to get started when you do not already have data, to begin with, so later you can replace it with a natural data source. What is the Expression Engine? The Expression engine takes string expressions and evaluates them to a value. That value might be a string, an integer, a boolean value, an object, or something else.  String expressions consist of four parts: Literals Operators Properties Methods Methods further divided into method pointers and custom methods.  There are also output converters. The output converters take the expression evaluated by the expressions engine and assign it to a property of a different type.  What are Scopes in the Expression Engine? Another thing is Scope – Scope is an essential concept in expressions with LiveBindings. Scope defines the object or objects that are visible to the expression engine. When an object is in scope, its properties and methods are available in the string expressions.  There is always at least one scope, but there are often two. One is associated with the control component, and the other is related to the source component. Quite often, the control component is known as the output scope. It is the target or the expression engine. In other words, the value of the expression created by the engine is assigned to a property of the component in the output scope or control component.  The source component is often visible to the expression engine in the input expression. The input expression whose value will be assigned to the property of the control and the output expression. The direction can be bi-directional, like from Control Component to Source Component or Source Component to Control Component.  Learn more about here on documentation: Is the future of data access really through data bindings? If you have been following our articles and webinars, you know the price of LiveBindings designer. For instance, you can easily connect to any third-party REST API and show the needed data on the target control without writing code. Even more, you can make interactive and dynamic actions using LiveBindings.  This tutorial will show how to utilize the TControlList component with LiveBindings. The demo app is demonstrated by Alister Christie, one of the best-known Embarcadero Delphi MVPs. Below is a view of a relatively new visual component called TControlList. TControlList visual component is introduced in RAD Studio 10.4.2 version – it is a virtualized list control.  This new control allows the developer to define the contents by designing one of the elements of the list […]

The long-term feasibility profiles of Delphi and Electron licenses are vastly different. This is related to Electron’s short history compared to Delphi’s 27-year evolution, and the difficulty of making reliable predictions about Electron’s future. In the blog post below we take a closer look at the long-term feasibility profiles of Delphi and Electron as part of an extensive benchmarking study. 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 eighth 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 8/26: Long-Term Feasibility Long-Term Feasibility: Does the framework have a history of stability, backward compatibility between major releases, bug fixes, and security updates? This metric highlights the confidence businesses can enjoy or the strategic risk they may take when choosing a framework. Benchmarking Results Delphi Score: 5 (out of 5) As a proprietary framework, Delphi requires businesses to purchase commercial-use licenses and offers optional annual updates for a fee. For this investment, users gain a stable, backward-compatible and growing framework with dedicated support teams and a 25-year history of success. The Delphi language has been growing, maturing, and expanding since 1995. It’s multi-platform desktop and mobile […]

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

The primary goal for most application development projects is delivering a working product that solves the problem it’s created for. However, let’s face it, what good is a solution if no-one uses it? That’s why metrics like user growth, engagement, and brand awareness are useful for measuring the success of a project. In other words, to provide the right conditions for your project to be considered successful, you must work to achieve these sub-goals – user growth, engagement, and brand awareness – right from the beginning. This involves choosing the right platform for your application and ultimately using the right tools to build on that platform.   Here is undeniable proof that you need a Windows software maker – something which is optimized for the delivery of professional-quality Windows applications with low code or minimal code with the right combination of developer productivity assistance technology to make your life easier and optimize your time. Ideally, the “right platform” would be one with a large community of users: What better spot to fish than one that’s teeming with fish? the answer is, currently, Microsoft Windows. Since 1985, when Windows 1.0 was released, it has evolved to provide the experience most end-users have come to expect today. The large community of Windows users does seem to underline that it’s still a popular platform despite fierce competition from Linux on the desktop and Apple’s macOS. In the overwhelming majority of corporate customers, it is Windows which is still very much the operating system of choice, especially for ‘regular’ non-technical users.  1.3 Billion Windows 10 Devices According to Microsoft, 1.3 billion devices are running Windows 10. In other words, over 16% of the world’s population uses the Windows 10 operating system. Therefore, building your solution on the Windows platform means you have the potential to reach this number of devices. When Windows 10 was released on July 29, 2015, Microsoft promised to provide a platform where developers can find growing success. For many of us, that means bringing our code to a large reach. Indeed, having a user base of 1.3 billion devices and counting sets them up to make good on their promise. Today, many developers and firms are building on Windows and enjoying great success.  According to Ben Schein, Product Manager at NPR, “Seventy percent of NPR listeners use Windows devices, and we’ve seen a 50-percent increase in their listening time just since Windows 10 came out. And that was before we upgraded our app.” Also, Lois Wang, Senior Product Manager at Box, shared: “By combining the two apps in Windows 10 as a universal Windows app, it decreased our engineering overhead and increased our velocity for future iterations. We’re really excited about this.” Having said all that, it’s evident that building on the Windows platform increases your chances of success. To do so, you need a Windows software maker. Delphi is one of the market-leading rapid application development environments for Windows applications. You can build native and cross-platform applications several times faster than competing methods. Some of its features include: Single Code Base for Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, and Linux – Even you can use that logic in web apps using 3rd party tools with Delphi. Cloud aware and a wide range of database components Responsive UI and fast prototyping for mobile […]

Windows app development is quite a large subject when you go beyond just scratching the surface. There are several different kinds of Windows app development beyond just the regular GUI application. In this article we take a look at a few of the other types of app such as Windows services, web server apps and even DLLs for Apache web servers. In Windows app development, what is a Windows Service? Windows Services are kinds of applications that run in the background. They are, most of the time are, non-UI applications. Windows services are usually registered to trigger when the OS boots and is scheduled to run in the background to execute some tasks. Moreover, Windows services can be started automatically or manually by Pause, Stop and Restart commands over Windows services. With these features in your application, you can create long-running apps that run in their own Windows sessions without interfering with other users working on the same computer.  You can easily create your service applications with Delphi and C++. This simple demonstration will teach us to make our service app with Delphi.  What are some examples of Windows Services? Windows auto-update Folder and file scanning SQL Server agent Auto checker for emails Using the Services control app, you can see and control all the available services in your Windows machine. How can I create a Windows Service using Delphi? Install the latest Delphi CE (Community Edition) and start it. Select: File -> New -> Other -> Delphi -> Windows -> Windows Service The TService class accomplishes connection and interfacing with Windows Service Manager. TService defines the Windows service we are developing like event handlers for communicating with the Windows OS. As you can expect, the service must work in the background and need to respond to messages to the OS commands independently. To do this, we need to create a new event on the TService called OnExecute. Service applications should answer the Windows ServiceController commands independently of what it is doing, so we need a background thread to do the actual work. The code above o the OnExecute event waits and handles the ServiceController commands, not real work.  Be sure to check out the official documentation on creating Windows Services using Delphi and C++ Builder. For Windows app development, what are Packages and how can I create them? Delphi has two different types of packages, runtime packages and design-time packages. Runtime packages are meant to be distributed with applications, just like DLLs, to keep down the executable size and prevent spreading duplicate code. The Delphi IDE can load design-time packages. They can contain code to register components with the component palette. Another intention is that write the DLLs that you want to share between your programs and another application in a different programming language.  Check out the official documentation to learn how to create packages and dynamic link libraries with Delphi and C++ Builder here! What kind of Web Server Windows App development can be done with Delphi? Delphi is a full-stack programming language that you can develop: Windows apps macOS apps Android apps iOS apps Linux apps Web apps Embedded apps Except for Delphi’s native frameworks and libraries for Web Server app development, there are lots of free and open-source frameworks that give you the ability to create server/client-focused […]

Modern application development can seem like a minefield even for experienced developers. Choosing the right Windows tools for developers that can guarantee increased developer productivity can be a seemingly overwhelming task.  In most areas of life, productivity is often correlated directly with speed. Unfortunately, some developers buy into this kind of thinking, especially during the nascent phase of Rapid Application Development (RAD). If developers complete a project in half the time expected, they are deemed productive. But in modern application development, speed does not necessarily equal productivity. Does your application meet the needs of the end-user? Is it easy to use? Is it secure? Does it contain unnecessary bloat? The list goes on and on.  Developer productivity depends on many factors, and simply being a fast developer doesn’t make you productive. If anything, It involves building applications in the most efficient way possible from an end-user perspective.  However, most Windows developer tools were built for fast application development. And although a few have evolved over the years to adapt to modern developer productivity, many are becoming less and less productive. Hence the need to define the expectations and reality of Windows developer tools.  Are Windows tools for developers generally productive? The software development industry is constantly evolving. Every new developer making their first foray into the industry will most likely be met with a new tool or framework that’s expected to help them maximize productivity – build high-quality products efficiently. Today, we have more sophisticated and “intelligent” Windows tools that would basically write, debug, and compile large swathes of code for you if you ask them to. Hence, helping developers produce more code faster. Unfortunately, some developers misconstrue this as productivity. However, in reality, writing more code can stifle productivity. And it begins with picking and constructing your toolchain carefully, with tools that enable you to write less code – only what’s necessary to develop high-quality applications. Tools like Delphi, with a low-code approach to developing applications without leaning on huge dependencies, such as libraries that contain more than the needed functionality, are productive. Delphi is capable of enabling productivity without compromising quality. It ticks all the boxes of sane modern software engineering. It offers intelligent code editing, which flattens out that learning (and memory) curve. A low-code wizard creates nicely laid-out, easy-to-understand, cross-platform apps that work on just about anything – Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, or Android. However, other tools like Visual Studio are now not as productive. For starters, it is insanely huge with an unnecessarily high amount of overhead for simply writing code. For not so high-end PCs, this can slow down its performance and ultimately reduce productivity.  There’s also the problem of complex toolchains. With Visual Studio, what Windows UI framework do you even choose? Things can get a bit more complicated when your application needs a user interface, and you need to identify the best GUI framework for your project. On the other hand, Delphi uses the VCL framework for Windows and the FireMonkey (FMX) visual framework for cross-platform responsive UIs.  For more information on how you can increase your productivity with Delphi, check out the tutorial video below. You can download a free trial of RAD Studio Delphi today and see for yourself how it can boost your productivity today.