peace on the web, too

From the CodeGear’s CEO, Ben Smith:

I have been spending a bit of time with partners in the development world ranging from ex Softies to ex Borlanders to really get more perspective on our efforts in Delphi, around PHP, with Eclipse, and Ruby.
[link]

What do you know … I guess I should think about what a Delphi for Ruby/Rails IDE could look like …

[Update]
CodeGear’s Michael Swindell, in a response on Mike Does Tech’s blog:

… But Ruby is different. Ruby as a language hasn’t yet taken off into the stratosphere, but it has more mindshare and great brains thinking about it today than any other up-n-coming language. It has the potential to be a very significant and with Rails it has the potential to go beyond public facing web apps and really be an alternative to Java or .NET in the Enterprise app world. With the “deregulation” and fragmentation of the Java world, and the constant demand for “an easier Java than Java”, RoR has a unique opportunity today. We do see Ruby and RoR in CodeGear’s future.

Finally, some action from the Delphi side, related mostly to Vista and the Web.
CodeGear (ex-Borland Developer Tools Group) announces today their new products for 2007:

• Delphi 2007 for Win32
• Delphi for PHP

But the most exiting news is burried in the press release. First:

Delphi for Win32 enables development of Vista supported applications
from the familiar Win32 environment, easy creation of web applications
that support AJAX, and streamlined enterprise database connectivity.

Then:

New
VCL for the Web lets you quickly and visually build interactive and
responsive web pages and applications that support AJAX techniques. VCL
for the Web embeds the low level technologies in visual objects so you
don’t need to know HTML, JavaScript, CSS, or HTTP, abstracting you from
such details so you can focus directly on code and user interface.

And it continues on the Delphi for PHP page:

The powerful
PHP editor and debugger increase coding speed and efficiency, while the
integrated VCL for PHP 5 component class library lets you quickly and
visually create PHP web applications and integrate PHP open source
components.

The old/new Delphi VCL (Visual Components Library) for desktop applications (from Delphi, Kylix, C++Builder), now arrives to the web development world (from Delphi, PHP and maybe Ruby?).

Now that is NEWS! If it really works, this could be really big.

powered by performancing firefox

So, after some bitter comments about Delphi’s Internet technologies, I’m back to something more … let’s say happy.

I must say that from the 2-3 sites where I tried to use AJAX with Websnap the experience was rather good. They were sites already in production, done with Websnap’s classic components, plus internal stuff.

The need was for me to explore how this AJAX-thing can be used and for the clients to gain some speed or responsiveness where possible.

In the AJAX-driven world, on the client-side there are some new challenges. Like the AJAX communication, the UI dynamics etc., stuff not needed or mostly covered by the designer till now. From the Rails worls I used prototype , a very simple to use and painless to integrate javascript library. It is conceived to integrate a framework, so go get it :)

For the interface dynamics I used the much praised yellow fade technique, even if I used something more appropriate for the sites’ color scheme, plus a lot of the code from the prototype library. The rest was almost all written from scratch.

I think this is th way to go for starters, you must find an area that has to be improved and use AJAX. Or rather found areas that could be rewritten using AJAX. Either way, beware of the rocks. There are some.

Anyway, it was a rather pleasant experience. I think Websnap could be used as a base for a AJAX-driven web framework. I see very easy some of Marco Cantù’s ideas fit very well - like the XMLAdapter or his XML documents framework he recently talked about. Also, the ClientDatasets ar every fit, as they can render as XML very easily.

My ideas are not very clear and I’m afraid Delphi’s recent years of hickups (let’s just stay at this calm, friendly word) will force us to seeother lands, more fertile, more friendly … I begun to study Rails this summer and it felt so good. I saw the Castle project rising in the ASP.NET world too, and all of these ar every good ideas.

I don’t know if there are some Delphi users that passionate to start an open-source web framework, but I surely love to see one.

*Update*: _Mon Dieu_, “Marco Cantù”:http://blog.marcocantu.com/blog/web20.html just hit it in the head again :)

I am a long time Delphi user. My interest in web development forced me to check other languages or areas that a standard Delphi (or desktop applications) programmer avoids or simply ignores. I am sorry, but this is the reality. Check the Borland Delphi newsgroups and see the amount of discussions on internet-related technologies for yourself. Those newsgroups are simply dying. The ASP.NET ones are still moving because they are new.

I even asked a couple of times if there is anybody using AJAX in Delphi. I had only some responses asking “what is this AJAX thing?” and it just stopped afterwards.

As always when it comes to Delphi web development, I see a hope in Marco Cantù’s books and articles. And now he’s even presenting an AJAX in Delphi session at the 2005 European Borland DevCon, which I will be trying to attend.

Note to self: an article on Delphi Internet technologies history would be usefull.

Just found an article on Saving Session Across Page Loads Without Cookies, On The Client Side (via ajaxian.com).

This is very usefull. I must see if it works in IE, Firefox (maybe Safari).

If it goes well (enough) this can be used to manage services “injection” in a web page, using ajax+client-side sessions. The service can be called using ajax, keeping its session on the client, which is very cool when the session contains (almost) only user data, as this way the user’s data don’t have to leave the user’s computer :)