Next Wednesday (March 13th) we have organized a presentation for all users that are afraid to upgrade and are staying (for example) with Delphi 7. In “The Power of XE3” session I’ll go through all* new features added to the Delphi and C++ Builder since Delphi 7 days. We’ll discuss language changes, platform changes, framework changes, additions to the VCL, RTL, database layer …
* As much as humanly possible. There are simply too many to cover them all.
Please note that it's not just the technology that is a factor in upgrade decisions. There are issues regarding quality control, support, pricing, the health of Embarcadero, and most especially the ecosystem - the state of Delphi jobs, available developers, educational material, conferences, etc.
ReplyDeleteAs someone who's been involved in advising companies on technology stacks to implement, I've practically pleaded with Embarcadero to address these issues (to help me help them).
In a related field, Embarcadero has absolutely NO information on their Delphi pages comparing the product to C#, C++, Java, D, Python, etc. One would think Delphi has no competition from reading the promotional material (a trait shared with Microsoft's web pages). I would also LOVE to see a presentation that specifically attempted to tell people why Delphi vs. one of the more popular development languages, why Interbase vs. PostgreSQL, why DataSnap vs. Node.js, etc. Even EMB's CEO declined to answer this question (twice) in an interview with The Register and even their tech evangelist flubbed an interview question on this topic. When even its own employees can't present a compelling use case, it makes it impossible for the rest of us to do so and present it as a viable platform for new firms or firms looking to replace outdated technology(or even, per your post's scenario, considering replacing Delphi 7 with something non-Pascal as well as with XE3).
+1
ReplyDeleteHaving used Delphi 6 for almost 10 years, we're in the middle of the move to XE3 (see my blog delphidisciple.blogspot.com for a diary of the migration). In my opinion, the IDE is excellent, the help is terrific (finally) and it is well worth the effort.
ReplyDeleteSure there are some Unicode issues to overcome but the compiler warns you & in the majority of cases, you just need to change a variable type or typecast one. There are plenty of white papers by Delphi luminaries to support this as well on the Embarcadero website.
I've put this off for years (I bought D2009 and never used it) but it honestly isn't as bad as you think, for a lot of benefits.