Comments on Bringing the Technofunk: Some things CodeGear RAD does well

1) Delphi supports nested functions, and that make...

2008-07-10T14:56:00.000-07:00

1) Delphi supports nested functions, and that makes stack management a bit different than other languages. And it would depart a lot from Pascal standards by allowing those kind of declarations.

3) Use a datamodule as a container for non-visual components. Despite its name, a datamodule its just a non visual container to allow for design time interaction. Datamodules are a good way to separate gui code from non-gui code.

4) Delphi 3rd party components usually comes with full source code (almost all) and good documentation (mostly commercial ones).

RAD Studio also support an API (OpenTools) to extend the IDE. There are plug-ins for several SCM tools.

Delphi can generate XML files to be used to create documentation, see http://dn.codegear.com/article/32770.

It was integrated with Borland Starteam, now that they are no longer tied I guess we'll see a much stronger integration with open source tools.

2008-07-07T06:11:00.000-07:00

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Fullblown SVN / Tortoise integration would indeed ...

2008-07-07T05:57:00.000-07:00

Fullblown SVN / Tortoise integration would indeed be nice. There are a couple of tools that does it already, but they are not fully aware of the Delphi file relationships.

Drastic measures...
How about a UML tool to document your classes, or that generate code from your data model? Delphi already has that. It's a bit inaccessble though... (View|Model View), and the GUI have "room for improvement".

There already are several different tools to produce javadoc like extract from Delphi source (DelphiDoc (open source), Doc-O-Matic, and some that have slipped my mind).

Any bugtracking tool with a web interface can be used within Delphi. IMO, it is more important that the tracking tool integrate with the version control tool - f.x. like TrackStudio integrates with SVN, allowing you to quickly see all changes related to a specific issue.

I don't need revolutionary improvements - but I sure would like them to fix a ton of small annoyances and the freaking painful MS based help system that sucks so hard you would think it could power a black hole.

Heh, yes I feel that competition among IDE's is gr...

2008-07-07T02:57:00.000-07:00

Heh, yes I feel that competition among IDE's is great for us! CodeGear (or Embarcadero) needs to do some drastic measures to draw new developers to their IDE, and to Delphi. What drastic measures? I dunno. They would need some special "thing" that Visual Studio doesn't. Graphical debuggers, better integration with CVS or SVN, integration with Trac or Bugzilla, a document generator (like Javadoc or Doxygen), so on and so forth.

Hahaha! Good illustration!
It enhance a very i...

2008-07-07T00:52:00.000-07:00

Hahaha! Good illustration!
It enhance a very important point. Competition is necessary for progress.

Good commentary as well. I mostly agree, possibly with the exception on the 3rd party widgets. As long as they come with source, it's all good.

I partially agree on the loop variable, although I actually tend to reuse them if I have consecutive (not nested) loops, but only for indexing. ix,rx,cx ... minimalist notation style for indexing variable. Indexes meant to be remembered, I assign to a variable with a more meaningful name.

Comments on Bringing the Technofunk: Some things CodeGear RAD does well

1) Delphi supports nested functions, and that make...

Fullblown SVN / Tortoise integration would indeed ...

Heh, yes I feel that competition among IDE's is gr...

Hahaha! Good illustration!It enhance a very i...

Hahaha! Good illustration!
It enhance a very i...