房
房客
Unregistered / Unconfirmed
GUEST, unregistred user!
.Net, Java or Delphi?
This is a response I gave to Mr. Angel Rosario, Jr. on borland.public.delphi.non-technical in regards of his concerns about the "best tool for the job".I wanted to include it in here for further reference.
"I will give you my personal point of view on the matter based on my history
and the things I have seen around me.
It is a difficult time but is possible to make technological decisions
*today*, that may turn good regardless of what is gonna happen. I made mine
and I will try to explain the whats and whys.
It's not easy to decide where to go and which boat to jump on. Neither one
of the two parties, Microsoft or Linux (let's put the others aside for a
second) are sure winners and I am not sure we should even attempt to predict
who will be the one at this point.
On this newsgroup the merits and the pitfalls of both have been discussed to
the extreme. Stability, scalability, speed, cost, etc etc etc have been the
heart of discussions for months in the non-tech.
Problem is that where the market will go is not about the most scalable or
stable system. It is about the perception the community has about that and
the services that it offers. The one that willdo
minate in this two matters,
will probably be the real winner but this won't mean the other will
disappear.
The first concept (perception) is the heart of publicity and propaganda and
is the most important.
The second (services) backs the first up but is not a lead factor.
Consider what happened around us in our field in the past few years, and
then
look at history.
Windows 95 has taken the desktop, Office has become the fact the business
application suite everybody uses and finally Internet Explorer has won the
browser war with the 85% of installed and used browsers.
Has those products been an example of quality? I wouldn't say so, definitely
at the begin
ning. But even if they weren't, they had something to offer and
for sure they are not as bad as today's arguments make them appear. At least
they delivered a service and in order todo
that, they took advantage of a
favorable perception that Microsoft generated around them.
There are many reasons behind what happened but thedo
minant is the
perception users have. AOL has become what it is for the same reasons.
Napster is not a real piece of art either but still, through perception and
services has became so strong to deserve to be world wide news when things
started to go bad.
History is made by 2000 years of examples of this pattern that drove masses
to any kind of things, good and bad.
This really took more lines than what I was originally thinking and I
probably have gone tangents...
Why I said what I said? Because at the end, no tool is gonna be so unique
and revolutionary to be the one and only one. Is not like the movie
Highlander. At the end, there will be more than one <G>
You mentioned Design Patterns and UML... That made me smile, because the
selling reasons behind VB, .Net and Delphi are everything but things like
that. The promise is about a RAD tool trough which you can develop your
applications in less than 15 minutes, not a tool that allows you to apply
design patterns, object oriented architectures and things like that. Is all
about the perception of faster time to market, which is wrongfully
associated with OnClicks.
Now, having RAD environments is a great thing. No questions about it. The
problem is that this allowed the spread of all kind of bad results around
us. This is not Delphi's fault but the user's. In the case of VB is a little
different but still the concept applies to some degree. Many people wouldn't
have that much of a problem moving their code if they would have followed
the rules.
A few months ago we had to decide if we wanted to use Delphi or Visual Basic
for our development. The main reason behind this question was that since we
are almost 90% Microsoft based, then
why shouldn't we go all the way? Well,
I tell you what: at the time .Net was one of the decisional points of
sticking to Delphi.
VB changed a lot in version 7. The kind of changes that have been made are
more important than abandoning a set of components or introducing new ones.
The changes affected the language in itself: things that are today present
in every OO language such as real inheritance and OO capabilities, were not
present in VB6 and would have led to a corrupted design. Code is easy to change,
if things aredo
ne properly. Architectures are not.
In an ideal world, design would probably take 70% of the time while
implementation is just a mundane and repetitive task. Changing the second
should be easy, changing the first, most likely leads to disasters.
So we choose to Delphi because everything wedo
today (architecture wise)
are portable to .Net, Java or whatever in the future, in case we need to. I
will probably embrace .Net in the future. It has a lot to offer and I can
guarantee that I'd love todo
that having Delphi as underlying language. But
this reallydo
esn't matter much.
Doesn't matter if it is called ADO, JDBC, ODBC or BDE... The principles
behind them are the same.
I use SOAP today. I have webservices regardless of Microsoft (although I use
their SOAP toolkit since mine is not finished yet <G>). We are developing a
system that is scalable, well designed and efficient in Delphi using
Microsoft technologies and I can assure you that the majority of the things
we aredo
ing, are gonna stay the same even if we move to .Net. The
architecture is what really matters, not the tool you use to achieve the
result (take out from this VB6 and previous, PowerBuilder and a few other
languages).
Don't get fooled by perception, in either way. There's a lot of good stuff
in .Net as well in Delphi or Java and there are things that should bedo
ne
better in all of them. Focus on the services they offer. See how you can
improve on what they offer if you need to. Borrow ideas from the others
because even if they are very similar, they are not the same.
Good luck"
This is a response I gave to Mr. Angel Rosario, Jr. on borland.public.delphi.non-technical in regards of his concerns about the "best tool for the job".I wanted to include it in here for further reference.
"I will give you my personal point of view on the matter based on my history
and the things I have seen around me.
It is a difficult time but is possible to make technological decisions
*today*, that may turn good regardless of what is gonna happen. I made mine
and I will try to explain the whats and whys.
It's not easy to decide where to go and which boat to jump on. Neither one
of the two parties, Microsoft or Linux (let's put the others aside for a
second) are sure winners and I am not sure we should even attempt to predict
who will be the one at this point.
On this newsgroup the merits and the pitfalls of both have been discussed to
the extreme. Stability, scalability, speed, cost, etc etc etc have been the
heart of discussions for months in the non-tech.
Problem is that where the market will go is not about the most scalable or
stable system. It is about the perception the community has about that and
the services that it offers. The one that willdo
minate in this two matters,
will probably be the real winner but this won't mean the other will
disappear.
The first concept (perception) is the heart of publicity and propaganda and
is the most important.
The second (services) backs the first up but is not a lead factor.
Consider what happened around us in our field in the past few years, and
then
look at history.
Windows 95 has taken the desktop, Office has become the fact the business
application suite everybody uses and finally Internet Explorer has won the
browser war with the 85% of installed and used browsers.
Has those products been an example of quality? I wouldn't say so, definitely
at the begin
ning. But even if they weren't, they had something to offer and
for sure they are not as bad as today's arguments make them appear. At least
they delivered a service and in order todo
that, they took advantage of a
favorable perception that Microsoft generated around them.
There are many reasons behind what happened but thedo
minant is the
perception users have. AOL has become what it is for the same reasons.
Napster is not a real piece of art either but still, through perception and
services has became so strong to deserve to be world wide news when things
started to go bad.
History is made by 2000 years of examples of this pattern that drove masses
to any kind of things, good and bad.
This really took more lines than what I was originally thinking and I
probably have gone tangents...
Why I said what I said? Because at the end, no tool is gonna be so unique
and revolutionary to be the one and only one. Is not like the movie
Highlander. At the end, there will be more than one <G>
You mentioned Design Patterns and UML... That made me smile, because the
selling reasons behind VB, .Net and Delphi are everything but things like
that. The promise is about a RAD tool trough which you can develop your
applications in less than 15 minutes, not a tool that allows you to apply
design patterns, object oriented architectures and things like that. Is all
about the perception of faster time to market, which is wrongfully
associated with OnClicks.
Now, having RAD environments is a great thing. No questions about it. The
problem is that this allowed the spread of all kind of bad results around
us. This is not Delphi's fault but the user's. In the case of VB is a little
different but still the concept applies to some degree. Many people wouldn't
have that much of a problem moving their code if they would have followed
the rules.
A few months ago we had to decide if we wanted to use Delphi or Visual Basic
for our development. The main reason behind this question was that since we
are almost 90% Microsoft based, then
why shouldn't we go all the way? Well,
I tell you what: at the time .Net was one of the decisional points of
sticking to Delphi.
VB changed a lot in version 7. The kind of changes that have been made are
more important than abandoning a set of components or introducing new ones.
The changes affected the language in itself: things that are today present
in every OO language such as real inheritance and OO capabilities, were not
present in VB6 and would have led to a corrupted design. Code is easy to change,
if things aredo
ne properly. Architectures are not.
In an ideal world, design would probably take 70% of the time while
implementation is just a mundane and repetitive task. Changing the second
should be easy, changing the first, most likely leads to disasters.
So we choose to Delphi because everything wedo
today (architecture wise)
are portable to .Net, Java or whatever in the future, in case we need to. I
will probably embrace .Net in the future. It has a lot to offer and I can
guarantee that I'd love todo
that having Delphi as underlying language. But
this reallydo
esn't matter much.
Doesn't matter if it is called ADO, JDBC, ODBC or BDE... The principles
behind them are the same.
I use SOAP today. I have webservices regardless of Microsoft (although I use
their SOAP toolkit since mine is not finished yet <G>). We are developing a
system that is scalable, well designed and efficient in Delphi using
Microsoft technologies and I can assure you that the majority of the things
we aredo
ing, are gonna stay the same even if we move to .Net. The
architecture is what really matters, not the tool you use to achieve the
result (take out from this VB6 and previous, PowerBuilder and a few other
languages).
Don't get fooled by perception, in either way. There's a lot of good stuff
in .Net as well in Delphi or Java and there are things that should bedo
ne
better in all of them. Focus on the services they offer. See how you can
improve on what they offer if you need to. Borrow ideas from the others
because even if they are very similar, they are not the same.
Good luck"
]
]