peace on the web, too

If anybody from CodeGear is lost on this page, take a look at this article: The ideal IDE. Excellent list of ideas to have in an IDE.

This one is my favorite:

Code searching:

• A very fast way to get from the current function you are in to any caller or to any function the function is calling (and class definitions, …)
• Ability to instantly search for a specific artifact (kind of like google / windows live search). As I type it in, I see the filtered results. This is NOT the find feature.

I think the new CodeGear IDE for Ruby and Rails has something similar. But it is integrated into the IDE like small helper windows. What would be neat is some keyboard shortcuts to quickly navigate the callers/callees.

In this presentation Jani and Kristofer show our philosophy, our ideas on instant feedback, data visualization and user experience approach.

I think this phrase (on the 21st page) summs it up pretty well:

“The next level (of electronic patient records):
I don’t want any input, I only want output.”

Enjoy:

(Presentation link)

Note: I work for PC PAL. You can also check out GrowthXP.com and our components on GrowthCharts.info.

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

I recently discovered Jimmy Nilsson’s weblog, I think that it was by searching the web on Eric Evans, Domain Driven Design etc. I am trying to understand how to begin a Delphi implementation of Specification domain pattern (Martin Fowler and Eric Evans).

Anyway, Jimmy Nilsson’s recent blog post, Post-agile struck a chord with me, as he grouped in the same article the things that interested me the most in the last year, year and a half or so: Domain Driven Design, Ruby and Rails, Behavior-Driven Development and Domain-Specific Languages. He also mentioned Intentional software, but I will leave that for the next year :)

What I really, really wanted to say is that I feel that the semantic (web or not) approach to the software development or domain design if you like is at least as important as the other items on the list. Maybe it isn’t or doesn’t seem as “agile” as the other ones, but I think that we’ll see more and more the influence the ontologies and their use on the development process itself.

If after a couple of years and projects what you accomplish is a semantic representation of your domain or domain patterns, collaboratively built, shared with customers and on which your working software is built (through BDD and DDD), you do follow the Agile manifesto, so building it starting today should be called agile too, right?

If you don’t believe me, read on to Danny Ayers’ Raw and then search “semantic agile” on Google.

Other links:

• Semantically-Enabled Knowledge Technologies
• Semantic Web starting points
• SAKE project

A wierd news just came on my newsreader:

Borland plans separate company for Delphi, JBuilder, C++Builder, InterBase, JDataStore and other developer products… link

If I get it right, Borland would sell its IDEs (Delphi, C++Builder, JBuilder, Kylix etc) or more generally its developer tools as a separate company to whomever would want it. More later.

In the RadRails blog an old idea has surfaced:

I’ve been tossing around this idea in my head and as I use RadRails more the need for a solution is clear. As you develop a rails application you constantly need to flip between view files and the controller where the actions reside. This is a point of lost productivity. Let’s fix it.

Wow. I mean just WOW! Man, sometimes it feels good to have been a Delphi developer for some time :) People! This feature exists from Delphi 1.0, this means since … 1995! Really, I am glad to see new, web, people coming to same ideas as those your favorite tool had since it’s beginnings. It just confirms the usability of this feature, it makes me feel like Rails and Delphi might belong to a family, in a way (a MVC frameworks family?). I saw recently some blog discussion about something similar regarding to Java/Eclipse and C#/VS.Net lacking the same feature.

In fact, the way I used Websnap until now is very similar to the templated approach of Rails. If only the Delphi community would not be this fatiguée, I feel Delphi didn’t say it’s last nor even first word (OK, maybe Webbroker was a good try) on the web development.

Finally I get to write a post about Delphi and Rails, at the same time.

Software Development>Press Room
CMP Media’s Software Development magazine today announced the finalists for this year’s Jolt Product Excellence and Productivity Awards. The 89 finalists in 14 categories were chosen by a team of Software Development editors, columnists, and industry gurus.

I really, really enjoy the nominations of:
- Agile Web Development with Rails by Dave Thomas et al. (Books: Technical)
- Rails 1.0 (Web Development Tools)
- Borland Developer Studio 2006 (Development Environments)
- Borland Together 2006 for Eclipse (Design Tools and Modeling )

Agile Web Development with Rails is an excellent book which I can only recommend, even if you don’t work or project to work with Rails, even if you don’t do web development (yet)! It clearly shows out how a good tool/framework/idea can take life and grow.

About Rails, go check their website, is too much to say on a single line.

Borland Developer Studio 2006 or BDS2006 or Delphi 2006 seems to be a very good product (finally!) from Borland, and it includes a bunch of languages for 2 platforms (2,5 if you count the embrionary support for .Net Compact Framefork): Delphi and C++ for Win32, Delphi and C# for .Net 1.1. Asp.Net, Unit tests, refactorings, Live templates support and especially speed and stability can only make it a good competition to VS.NET or other tools.

Other nominations I find interesting or support:
- Google Maps API 2005 (Database Engines and Data Tools!)
- Eclipse SDK 3.1 (Development Environments)
- Fog Creek Copilot 1.2 (Utilities)
- Backbase Standard Edition 3.1 (Web Development Tools)

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 :)

In the early days (Delphi 1 to 4) I didn’t had a great interest in the Delphi Internet development proposals. I think it was Delphi 4 that proposed for the first time *Internet Express*. Delphi 5 introduced *WebBroker*. Delphi 6 added the *Websnap* layer to WebBroker. And then … silence. Oh, in the most recent products (Delphi 8 and 2005) there is ASP.NET (with code behind in Delphi), of course.

It is good to mention the two most notable third-party web frameworks (built on top of WebBroker and/or Websnap): “ExpressWebFramework”:http://www.devexpress.com/Products/VCL/EWF/ and “IntraWeb”:http://www.atozed.com/intraWeb/.

Personally, I have used Internet Express, WebSnap and ASP.NET. I only took a look at the third party ones.

So, let’s start with *Internet Express*. The central point of the development were the _page producers_. These were components that could take an html file or stream, pass it through a tag replacement filter and feed it to the response. Their design was so simple and generic that they can be used even in desktop applications (creating html dynamic pages as replacements of the classic grids or help pages).

The big thing, looking back at it, it is the InternetExpress’s MIDAS link. In fact, with no much of a hassle, one could write a desktop application and a web application using the same code on the server. By same code understanding the code providing client-side datasets with data from the database. I will get back on this one later, coupled with AJAX (note to self).

*WebBroker* went a lot further and proposed _web modules_ with _actions_. The actions correspond to the URLs that your application will respond to. The big news was that one could compile a CGI, ISAPI or Apache module (dso) with almost the same code, using only different project files. This was a big advance, and a hell of a reason to use Delphi. At the time WebBroker appeared, Borland provided Kylix, a Delphi/C++Builder sibling working on Linux. Add the triple offer (CGI/Isapi/Apache mdules) to Linux compilation and we have something very interesting! This was the time Delphi was in the frontline.

And here comes *Websnap*. Announced in a big way (_the RAD web framework_), Websnap is now a big disappointment. It was built on top of WebBroker and offered a lot of advantages, not loosing anything of the WebBroker’s offer. I must mention that I am still using it until today in my work.
And it was not bad. For starters, you got multiple WebModules, user management base components, session management (in-process by default, easily to expand to database hosted), adapters (layer between datasets and the produced page) etc.
But, man, it was complicated! Anything in it was written using interfaces. Which is not bad. But is very difficult to debug. Try only to debug a CGI. Now imagine ISAPI. That’s cold outside. Get in!

For me, it looks like at that point (between Delphi 6 and 7) it just stopped. At the same time, Delphi guys (read managers) saw .Net and we were left with our hammers and stones… I mean, Kylix stopped at the same time, Websnap too, this is a big chunk of Delphi! The Linux part and the Web part.

Now, we got ASP.NET. It is true, Websnap and WebBroker and Internet Express are still there, in the Win32 version of Delphi 2005. It has quirks, same bugs, same difficulties, no third party support (except those two frameworks mentioned before) - which shows how difficult is to grow something on those components.

Me, I am thinking that a combination of Websnap with InternetExpress and AJAX would (have) kill just any concurrence. They got it all, they just let it slip.

Now back to my Web 2.0 blogs, where nobody mentions Delphi no more ….

Update: some typos, some tenses …

Update 2: As usual, Marcu Cantù gets it sooner than others ;)