Delphi for PHP - one sweet tool

[SFilip]

http://www.codegear.com/products/delphi/php
Grab that trial.
A PHP editor with RAD-like interface.

I really hope a Turbo version comes out at some point.

 

[mase]

Sweet. Thanks for the link.

 

[enouwee]

http://www.codegear.com/products/delphi/php
Grab that trial.
A PHP editor with RAD-like interface.

I really hope a Turbo version comes out at some point.

This IDE combines two of the worst things that have ever been created *shudder*

And it has a pretty hefty price tag (> 250$), given the free competition it has to face:
http://www.eclipse.org/pdt/index.php
http://www.phpeclipse.de/
and the most powerful editor ever ... vi

 

[SFilip]

> two of the worst things
Delphi and PHP?
I really consider Delphi a very nice thing to work with (ignoring the price of course ), the two worst would more likely be...say .NET and (Visual) Basic?
Of course there is also Java, C# (again tha damn .NET!), C++, Windows Registry...

However I had no idea the eclipse project has things like that, thanks

 

[enouwee]

> two of the worst things
Delphi and PHP?
I really consider Delphi a very nice thing to work with (ignoring the price of course ), the two worst would more likely be...say .NET and (Visual) Basic?
Of course there is also Java, C# (again tha damn .NET!), C++, Windows Registry...

PHP is a security nightmare, being both insecure and broken by design (yes, I already said it and I can't repeat it often enough). After almost 10 years of using it, I'm definitely fed up with the limitations and questionable design choices made. I had some hopes that PHP6 would put more efforts into security, but since reading the Paris 2006 meeting notes my choice is made.

Delphi, unlike most of the other languages you mentioned, combines two disadvantages: it is a proprietary and closed environment (no third party compilers available to my knowledge) and the company backing the product isn't a major player in the software industry (Borland, who's that? I haven't heard anything from them in the last few years).

Should Borland (didn't the company switch names a while ago?) decide to discontinue the product, your application will have to be rewritten for Vista 2013. You want to run the application on an OS not supported (Kylix, if still maintained is only available for Linux)? You're screwed.

We've been taught Logo, Basic and Pascal in school, nowadays it's Java.

The others:

• C, C++ should cover the most hardware platforms (thanks to GCC). There are many cross-platform GUI toolkits available (QT, GTK, only two name the two most common)
• C# its native OS may be Windows, but thanks to Mono, other architectures are available as well
• Java ... well, Sun chose an "open source" license for future releases. Again, many platforms covered
• Basic? It could be an equal contender to Delphi, if there weren't Microsoft behind it You may have to "fix" your application from time to time in order to keep it working on the latest and greatest release. Platforms? Only Windows to my knowledge, but if you chose that language to write your application in, other OSes are probably the last thing you worry about

 

[SFilip]

> no third party compilers
http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/
Not fully compatible, sometimes a delphi project requires a couple of minor modifications, but yeah.
In addition it seems like a growing project/community

Though I do admit - you are right about the rest of it.
But unfortunately there aren't any good and well known alternatives to PHP from what I know. Even when one does appear it never receives enough audience ("I have PHP, it works, why should I need this?") and gets discontinued soon enough.

 

[enouwee]

> no third party compilers
http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/
Not fully compatible, sometimes a delphi project requires a couple of minor modifications, but yeah.
In addition it seems like a growing project/community

The existance of this proves that there's nothing that doesn't exist somewhere on the interweb.

But unfortunately there aren't any good and well known alternatives to PHP from what I know. Even when one does appear it never receives enough audience ("I have PHP, it works, why should I need this?") and gets discontinued soon enough.

As in "shared hosting environment, easy to set up" or "hacking (think: copy/paste) for 10 minutes and thinking you can get your webform somehow do what you want it to", no there are no real alternatives. Perl's been around much longer than PHP, but its syntax is quite ... compact (or complex).

Most "alternatives" use some kind of framework, thus you aren't free to program the way you want, as you have to respect some rules. The learning curve might be steeper, but it's definitely worth the effort for larger projects (anything with a common layout and using more than 2-3 mini-applications):

• Java: Struts, Spring and friends
• Ruby: Rails
• Python: Zope, Django
• Perl: Catalyst

PHP got its "official" framework a few days ago, the Zend Framework.


But to get back on topic ... you can use Eclipse to code in any of these languages. As it's written in Java, it runs on almost any OS that has plenty of RAM available.