In the comments to a previous post there cropped up the complaint that people asking for a realistic Starter Edition are just looking for a cheaper edition of Delphi for themselves. Maybe some of us are, but even so we are – or at least I am – not primarily concerned with the savings to our pocket. The consequence of there not being an affordable edition costs Embarcadero – and the remaining “Delphi Gentlemen’s Club” members – far more in the long run.
First of all, why shouldn’t some of us be looking for a cheaper version ? And why should the users of the current/more expensive editions begrudge that ?
I’ve made this point countless times… my employer pays for my “day job” license. That’s an Enterprise license. At home I want something for my personal, non-money making use because if I use my employers license, anything I do even in my own time can be claimed by them (and you never know, I might just hit upon a valuable idea). But in the main, that personal use doesn’t make money. It’s simply a cost.
Heck, this blog doesn’t even pay for itself !
As such, software tools have to compete for my $ along with all my other hobbies and domestic expenses. Starter doesn’t cut it, and Pro is over-priced. Just because I earn my salary with Delphi (currently) that doesn’t make my personal use anything more than the hobby that it is. Should it ever pay for itself, let alone earn me anything above covering that cost, of course I would happily pay whatever the (reasonable) asking price.
I frankly find it offensive that I be regarded as being somehow “cheap”.
The Bigger Picture
Then there is the bigger picture, which also starts with a personal portrait.
The result of there not being an affordable version of Delphi suitable for someone such as myself is that I have quit Delphi altogether at home as far as any personal work goes.
But the bigger point, and the issue that goes beyond any $ savings for me personally is that there is broadly speaking no academic path into Delphi. Employers are looking for experienced developers but the only way for most people to get that experience is off their own back.
Universities no longer teach it. Very, very few employers are willing to take on developers to be trained in Delphi even if they could find a potential trainee who would choose to hitch their career to Delphi over any of the other alternatives on offer.
I myself came to Delphi because Delphi 1.0 was cheap enough for me to afford it at the time. I had some exposure to Turbo Pascal for Windows and encouraged my employer at the time to sign up for the Delphi Early Experience Program. They chose to stick with their existing tool (Gupta SQLWindows), but I was so impressed that I decided to buy Delphi for myself (and I wasn’t earning anything like then what I am earning now).
In a later employment as a SQLWindows consultant, a potential project came up which SQLWindows wasn’t suitable for. I suggested Delphi, the suggestion was met with approval and that one copy of an affordable version of Delphi led, directly, to the further sale of multiple copies of more expensive editions.
Now as for the learning value of VCL source.
I don’t recall whether the VCL source was included with 1.0 – I suspect that it wasn’t, though Delphi 1 was a far less complex beast than it is today and the documentation somewhat better as I seem to recall. And, backing up a little, if the source wasn’t included this is probably why my self-taught path really didn’t start to take off until Delphi 2, which did come with VCL source.
I know a number of people with a similar story. And certainly the view that VCL source is not a useful learning resource is a minority one. And a very small minority at that. Of course, it’s not an opinion that is subject to a democratic process, but it does suggest to me that the people who don’t see the value in the VCL source as helpful perhaps either don’t remember their own learning experience very well or have a peculiarly different approach to learning.
But in any case, why be so begrudging of a proper, affordable entry level edition of Delphi ?
Your Kind Aren’t Welcome Here
I suspect it makes at least some of the last outpost of Delphi stalwarts feel better about themselves to keep their club exclusive and in the knowledge that membership is reassuringly expensive. But it does them no good in the long run.
The result of pulling up the drawbridge to make it more difficult to get into Delphi is that the “anchor users”, the ones paying the big licensing renewals year after year, eventually find themselves without a reliable source of skilled staff and so they too are forced to quit Delphi.
My previous employer was one of New Zealand’s largest Delphi developer employers. They quit Delphi some time ago.
In my role with my current employer I have just made the decision to renew our SA, but this followed a lengthy discussion during which it was agreed that unless something completely unforeseen were to occur in the next 12 months this will be our last renewal.
This also a story with which I am sadly increasingly familiar and which has cropped up more than once in the comments to that earlier post.
The old guard are dying/leaving. Where’s the new blood coming from ?
The Question Remains Unanswered
It will be interesting to see if there are any new faces at the XE5 tour event next week here in Auckland. But as in years past I do not expect to see any thing other than the same old faces with a few more grey hairs.
I can only think that some people’s experience is different as they seem intent to cling on to the idea that all is tickety-boo and hunky-dory in the house of Delphi, and begrudge anyone getting a “better deal” than them.
I asked before if anyone knew of any entirely new Delphi users.
So far not one respondent has indicated that they do. Not even those who seem to think that there’s nothing wrong in the “recruitment” strategy.
I think the source came with v1 if you bought the ‘client-server’ edition. We were using it to prototype some work with an Oracle DB at the time (hoping to steer our company away from FoxPro and the impending, seemingly inevitable Visual Foxpro that was mooted) so we had to get the CS version. I’m 99.9% sure we had the VCL source as part of that.
I think you could be right. I have a “Museum of Delphi”, all my versions from 1 thru XE4, on a drive. Only a few are actually installed anywhere though, and Delphi 1.0 wasn’t one of them. Delphi 2 had it’s “RUNIMAGE” folder so I could see the VCL source included there.
What I didn’t keep was the dead-tree manuals, but I remember that back then and for a while after, every new release of Delphi came with an impressive and very useful set of printed material. And a class hierarchy wall-chart ! š
Source code came with Delphi 1 C/S. Not sure about the Professional SKU.
I don’t think there was a Professional SKU back then, it was just “Client/Server” and “Personal” wasn’t it ?
I remember there being two SKUs, but I can’t remember what the lower end one was called.
Found some information.
It looks like it was “Delphi” and “Delphi Client/Server”.
In Delphi 2 it was “Delphi Desktop” and “Delphi Client/Server”
According to this old feature matrix, it looks like source code was in both of Delphi 1’s SKUs.
http://web.archive.org/web/19961221161948/http://www.borland.com/delphi/delphi1.0/csqinfo.html
Nope – the VCL was included in both, but the source code was indeed only in the C/S edition (near the bottom of that matrix). But you could get the VCL source code as part of the “RAD Pack” add-on.
Good find! I was just a few clicks behind you I think. š
Odd. RTL source code is in both, but VCL source code is only in client/server.
Ah yes, the Rad-Pack. We didn’t know what it was, but our reseller (either Grey-Matter or QBS) assured us that we would need that too if we were serious about using Delphi š
I seem to recall there were 2 levels of it, and the only way we could get Oracle or SQL Server connectivity was with the (eye-watering, for back then) C/S edition which even then was well over a grand (sterling) a seat I think. In a really short time, my colleagues and I knocked up enough of a working demo with it that the company was impressed and went out and bought a few more licences to go with the one that we’d bought ‘on-spec’.
To be fair to them, that was a reasonably brave leap of faith back then, it would have been safer for the company to stick with MS tech. Thankfully myself and one of the other guys there (who now works high-up for Twitter) were big Turbo Pascal fans and we’d had racked up a fair few miles in BP/O7 too – we’d got enough ‘normal’ SQL from Sybase SQL Anywhere and Oracle that everything clicked into place.
And here I am, 20-odd years later, still using D2007 Enterprise every day and dipping my toes in Xamarin Studio, the first real break with Delphi that I’ve made since the Foxpro days.
This year was the first time in a very long time that I’ve not paid my SA. The pace of change is too much for me now (I hardly have time to install the new version and upgrade components, fix my source code etc before it’s time for the next one) – I just wish they’d spend more time service-packing the last version or testing/getting the next one right.
I feel as a developer, a ‘new, & by inference also buggy’ version every year is far too much, it’s just too fast a pace. I understand their need to drive SA renewals but think it should just be a subscription model, the people that need it for a living don’t care if the versions are only coming out every 2 years if what actually does come out is thought-through, tested and then supported for more than a derogatory 5 minutes. I’d happily pay SA for a year without expecting to get a new version that year if I thought there would be a service pack (or appropriate hotfixes) for the previous version, going through that additional 12 months, and that if there was nothing new this year then there would probably be something new next year.
So for the record, I don’t really have a problem with the price of SA. It’s my whole job (I’m self-employed), and currently everything revolves around Delphi for me. But I’ve paid the Ā£700-800 SA every year for a long time now and through no fault of anyone else’s, most of my stuff is still stuck in pre-unicode D2007. None of my clients see a need to pay for my time to move to something like XE2 (which was the last one I seriously tried to get started with), and increasingly as time goes on there are components and dependencies that are going to be harder and harder to migrate.
Finally, if I’m honest, after seeing how the first iterations of FireMonkey and Android support etc seem to go, being rewritten for v2 or being pulled etc etc) I’m kind of glad I didn’t have a chance to start betting my mortgage on this stuff – I’m just not entirely convinced there are any cool heads or calm thoughts going on over there at Emb, it all seems just so fluid and volatile…
“Iād happily pay SA for a year without expecting to get a new version that year”
Yeah, but a lot of people would raise hell over it. It’s the number one complaint I hear about SA; The fear that a release might take 12 months and 1 day.
I suspect you’re right Bruce but to my mind that’s a big chunk of the whole problem. This annual-cycle needs a big team, which costs money. And I think it’s crazy that Emb are bullied into this – look at MS and Visual Studio. That’s a fairly mature, fairly stable tool (okay, there’s a decoupling there between .Net and VS but even so) – people will stand a 2-year cycle if that cycle covers a professional product with a certain level of support and a feeling that things are being done ‘right’.
And the people who won’t/can’t accept that – well to be honest it’s those customers who are helping to kill the business, almost as much as Emb’s (somewhat dynamic and idiosyncratic) approach is doing.
I would love to see (much) more attention paid to the backlog of bugs that are constantly pushed off because a big ticket feature gets priority.
But people complain when a release has bug fixes or and not a lot of major features.
With a subscription model this kind of incremental improvement (of which I’m a big fan) can be done with frequent updates without having to take focus away for the next major release cycle. Big features can be added when they are ready and fixed/improved along with the frequent releases without having to wait for the next major release.
I may just be dreaming, though.
It’s Embarcadero who can’t accept a greater than one year cycle. Motley Fools labeled them a “struggling data tools vendor” before they got acquired in 2007 and they’re still not close to being the number one player in that field. They’ve also plowed a lot of cash into some failed products. They’re owned by a venture capital firm with a history of doing roll-ups – buying two or more companies and mashing them together for “synergy”, in this case EMBT and CodeGear – then either doing an IPO or flipping for a profit later. VC firms are not a Warren Buffet “buy and hold for 20 years” kind of operation. CEO Wayne Williams can be replaced at whim and you can be sure that he’s got financial targets to meet. There have been several rounds of layoffs at EMBT over the last few years. It’s probably meet the numbers via revenue or via cutting costs (people). Everything we hear from the inside is that it’s EMBT itself that forces the yearly shipping cycle against the wishes of the developers. Supposedly the straw that broke the camel’s back right before Nick got fired was a comment about being careful about bugs “because Embarcadero will ship crap”, which he hasn’t denied.
Please don’t go blaming the victim – it’s the users who are being milked for cash, not poor Embarcadero suffering under customers’ irrational demands. If this were the case there wouldn’t be SA. It’s EMBT that pushes bug fixes into later versions (I’ve got plenty of examples of QC bugs that were reported in and resolved in the time frame for support for version X but nevertheless only saw the fix added to version X+1) and expects people to pay for bug fixes. EMBT is the one who turned a bugfix release into “XE4” and made people pay for it. They’re also the ones who took mobile out of the product then reintroduced it as a separate product, making even SA holders pay again for what they should have been entitled to for free. The idea that a “ship a yearly (now twice yearly?) product no matter what even if it’s not finished” is something being driven by outside forces, much less customers, is completely contrary to all existing patterns of behavior.
I would put it slightly different.
“Pay again for what they had been given the clear impression they had already paid for”
I should have asked on Friday what is in XE5 (Pro) for anybody not interested in the Android addition to the Mobile-Add On, and what they will be expected to pay for nothing this time around ?
If anybody is going to a World Tour event still yet to happen, perhaps you could ask that question ?
SA always made more sense for Enterprise users and above so that’s probably a more common complaint among Pro SKU subscribers since 2x SA payments is more expensive than a one-off upgrade. It’s cheaper to skip a release or two and/or cherry-pick the releases of actual interest, than it is to pay SA annually on the off-chance that each and every release will be relevant to you.
And with SA fees being potentially increased 4% annually, compounded, even when product and upgrade prices have not increased (they tried to increase mine after the first year but fell foul of their own terms and conditions) the relative value of SA continually erodes.
Which is presumably why Embarcadero tightened the upgrade eligibility – instead of sweetening the carrot they chose to wield a bigger stick.
SA isn’t more expensive for the Professional SKU. The upgrade price is cheaper (as a percentage of a new purchase).
The upgrade price may be less as a percentage, but that is part of the problem, because SA is the same percentage – 30% of the new user price across the board. And since SA is supposed to save money on upgrades, not new user purchases (to which it adds cost) then the comparisons have to be drawn against the upgrade prices.
And as a result of those upgrade prices being “cheaper”, %-wise, as you go ‘down’ the SKU’s, the value of SA is eroded along the way.
2 years of SA on Arch = $2400. Upgrade = $2500
2 years of SA on Ent = $1500. Upgrade = $1500
2 years of SA on Pro = $600. Upgrade = $549
Come on, we are supposed to be intelligent people, I shouldn’t have to do this arithmetic for you!
I’ll rephrase so as to not be confused with an unintelligent person.
SA for is 30% of the cost of a new purchase per year. That’s across the board (Delphi and Rad Studio) and has been the case for some time.
An upgrade is roughly 60% (or higher) of a new purchase. The exception is Delphi Professional, which was about 45%
SA cost is the same. Upgrade costs were less expensive for the Professional SKU, making it less attractive.
There has been a change recently, though. SA is still 30% across the board, but the upgrade cost of Delphi Professional is 55% of a new purchase and Rad Studio Professional is 60%.
So SA is about as attractive for Professional users as everyone else.
Good news!
Since you like percentages so much (except when needing to state a preformed conclusion at which you wished to arrive, at which point “about as” is as precise as you get), I’ll put in terms that make sense to the percentage obsessed:
2 years SA Upgrade (x2) SA / Upgrade x2 % x1 Upgrade Arch $2400 $5000 48% 96% Ent $1500 $3000 50% 100% Pro $600 $1100 54% 109%6% points is sufficiently negligible that it can be dismissed as a ’rounding error’ and characterised as “about as attractive” ?
I’d love to be the guy negotiating your remuneration. š
As the final column shows, if only every other release is of use/interest then things simply do not make sense for the Pro user at all. And it is a very common refrain to hear that the bother/expense of upgrading 3rd party components is not worth it for every release, and so every other release – if not even less frequent – is a commonly observed pattern.
It is no coincidence that the upgrade eligibility window has been closed. It acts as a big stick to waive threateningly over the rear end of any ass with the temerity to be not sufficiently enticed by the promise of an as yet unknown carrot dangled in front of them.
I don’t know what point you’re making here.
My point is that SA is worth while if you upgrade frequently. If you skip every second version, it probably isn’t worth while.
As for the percentages, as I mentioned, Delphi Professional is now 54%. Rad Studio Professional is now 60%.
This is recent (since the last time I checked), and brings the Professional SKUs more in line with the rest.
My point is, was and remains that SA is not as attractive to Pro users. A point which you disputed. I was showing my reasoning. Which is more than can be said for a rationale which leaps from one set of not quite accurate figures to an imprecise “about as attractive” assessment and now adds a further jump to “worthwhile [under certain conditions]”.
Yes, if you are upgrading to every single version then SA makes sense, but very few people that I know of actively operate on this basis. It is a theoretical/potential benefit and one which relies on an element of trust since you are asked to pay for SA before you know what it is that you will be getting. Trust? Embaracadero? I refer you back to the litany of reasons not to trust this company.
In recent history, Embarcadero have shown a willingness and an intent to deliver less in future releases of the Pro edition than a current user might reasonably expect, which makes SA even less attractive than the numbers themselves already demonstrate.
Even allowing for the new criteria of “updating frequently”, the fact remains that the periodicity of “frequently” required to achieve “worthwhile” is different for a Pro user (every year) than an Enterprise or above user (every other year). A fact which your comfortable and convenient percentages obscure. I wonder, are you bucking for an MVP badge ? š
And even if they are upgrading every year, the value to a Pro user of SA remains less, both as a percentage (delta -6%) and as a dollar value (delta -$2100) compared to Architect (and a little less, less attractive compared to Enterprise).
I actually agreed at first and just corrected some semantics.
Then I saw that the pricing had changed. It’s a little better for Delphi Pro, and exactly the same (percentage) for Rad Studio Pro as the other SKUs.
Standard, Developer, Client Server afik. I remember not having had access to the C/S. I think it was the Developer Edition.
http://www.delphi-treff.de/ueber-delphi/versionen/versionen/
I cannot remember the Standard.
Its time you switch to Lazarus and FPC across the
Board. I don’t even use Delphi anymore since Lazarus 1.0
Was released and have been porting everything I can.
Sure some work is involved but its worth it to be free of borcadero.
Switch and the whole starter edition bull is a moot point.
Start being a Lazarus/fpc evangelist and let 3rd party
Component devs know they need to make their products work
With Lazarus.
All the stuff I have ported also works on Linux which I could
Not do with my expensive Delphi licence.
Lazarus is a viable alternative to Delphi and many cases
The identical code I copied from my Delphi apps is several times
Faster and no fire Monkey to write cross platform.
The LCL is almost identical to vcl and the learning curve to
Switch is nil.
Jolyon – so you still like Delphi enough to use it, were it priced more reasonably (in your view)?
I have to say you usually give the impression that you think Delphi is doomed and that Oxygene is far superior, so why you should worry about the price of it is slightly beyond me.
If Delphi was the right price, would you use it in favour of Oxygene?
Nope. If Delphi were the “right price” I might keep it in my kit bag for Win32/Win64 development but FireMonkey is entirely the wrong approach imho, and Oxygene provides the ideal solution for me… the ability to use ObjectPascal but in a genuinely native fashion for those other platforms.
Unless things change I believe Delphi is doomed (but then, aren’t we all, ultimately? :)), but that doesn’t mean I don’t care.
What’s wrong with Firemonkey? A GUI toolkit based on an OpenGL base sounds quite convincing to me. Maybe it’s not done yet, but I really like the overall idea. Now that they got this and their LLVM compiler, Delphi could run everywhere (except maybe WinRT, but that’s a different story).
“Whatās wrong with Firemonkey?”
– Bad UI performance
– A lot of string based style mappings (Bad for refectoring, …)
– The Font looks bad to read. Blurred and different charactar spacing on longer text.
The none UI stuff looks good.
When is the last time you had something even remotely positive to say about Delphi or the so-called “Delphi Stalwarts”? Even trying to read your posts with a sympathetic eye, they don’t come off as even remotely objective.
Not that I expect you to take it to heart. I’m just sayin…
That said, I do agree about the barrier to entry. I absolutely believe that there should be a cheap or even free entry level SKU.
I don’t know how well the Starter version sells, but I think it misses the mark on price, features and licensing restrictions. I would love to see something closer to the Turbo releases. I understand there are other implications, but if I were starting out and/or looking for a hobbyist/OSS tool, I would consider this SKU to be both too expansive and too crippled to bother with.
I also understand that some people will complain no matter what. I remember people complaining that the Turbo versions had any restrictions at all and wanted Borland to give away the Professional SKU for free.
I think there’s a reasonable middle ground.
Hmmm… Clumsy wording. I should have read it through before sending.
The record shows that I have said many positive things about Delph over the years, but I will not say positive things when I see none to be said merely out of some sort of mis-placed gratitude or affection.
Not in recent memory.
>When is the last time you had something even remotely positive to say
>about Delphi or the so-called āDelphi Stalwartsā? Even trying to read your
>posts with a sympathetic eye, they donāt come off as even remotely
>objective.
Bruce, you and I have debated on the EMBT forum before (don’t think it turned out very well), but I can honestly say I formed the same opinion of you, just in the opposite direction. š
Those who are often insisting on a litany of positive aspects about Delphi and Embarcadero never seem to offer evidence that there are any. It’s like complaining about the last time you heard a positive message from the Syrian State Tourism Board. š Embarcadero often manages to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory (“Hey, let’s buy FireDAC! Oh, and just to be sure it’s a PR disaster instead of a success, let’s announce at the same time that we’re ending FreePascal support for the product and call them a competitor even though they saved our bacon with iOS in XE2! We’ll be greeted as liberators!”).
I won’t start a diatribe here, but look at Apple for a sec – even if you’ve never used one of their products (like me), you know they have a great reputation for quality – you know if you did buy one of their products you wouldn’t be concerned about it being a bugfest or falling apart. When iMaps had a problem the CEO personally apologized and a higher-up who wouldn’t got fired. Now think about the disaster of iOS support in XE2. Absolutely no one apologized. CEO Wayne Williams remains as mysterious as the Masked Comic; no one ever sees his face or hears a word from him. In fact, no one has ever even admitted there was a PROBLEM with XE2 except in one blog post Marco referred to some “rough edges” with FireMonkey’s debut. Now stir in the EULA fiasco and Delphi 8, sprinkle on the Code Insight of the IDE that’s been broken for several releases, shake well, and then ask yourself who’s to blame here. Embarcadero has an EARNED negative reputation due to a persistent pattern of being willing to ship unfinished products, providing little in the form of bug fixes and support, refusing to acknowledge faults the rare times they come down from the mountain to talk with we mere mortals, and doing nothing to try to earn back our trust.
It’s EMBT who bears all the responsibility for a large group of users who continually assume the worst – those who do are (almost?) never wrong. They worked as hard as Apple did to get a large group of users who assume the best, just in the wrong direction. If that relationship is to be repaired, EMBT needs to acknowledge its failures, pillory itself like Tim Cook did, Wayne Williams needs to prove he’s not just a stock model photo, and the users have to be compensated for what they’ve had to put up with. Then EMBT needs to deliver a rock-solid, super-smooth feature-filled, value-packed release that users can be proud of. It’s past performance that leads many of us to assume that XE5 will not be that release, not negativity. There’s been a persistent patterns of first releases of EMBT technology being half-baked. They earned it; they’ve got to own it. If they don’t like it (and I’m not sure they’re even AWARE of it), they need to fix it.
Big surprise. People on Centura (Gupta successor) are off a lot worse. It went totally wrong. I think DBase customers are better off. XOJO is nice (former RealBasic)
Delphi has a good standing between what we can call ‘4GL/CS’ solutions of the past (4D, Centura and friends) and the big vendor solutions.
There is no young blood, there will be none. Don’t you think to on-board young developers is a challenge to most technology providers.
The U.S. are missing about 40k qualified developers with academic degree. I don’t think that people with academic degrees are aiming at staying a developer. That’s a contradiction imo, especially when you have to work in teams.
Big technologies have been very attractive because the young inspired engineers from university could make a fast career or have been promised one. Delphi is not for people seeking a career. The situation is similar in many other parts of the world. This means that young blood is attracted either by high salaries or big companies who are wasting developer’s talent to maintain existing solutions. In both cases you end up in the corporate dread-mill. And libertarians can rarely be found today.
Developers on mainstream technologies are in a very convenient position. They can cook the same soup for the next 2 decades and no one will complain.
Couldn’t agree with you more.
Jolyon – would you use Delphi if it was cheaper? I thought you believed it was a sinking ship, badly managed and declining in quality, and Oxygene was far superior.
Perhaps a post about what you still really like about Delphi would be interesting?
For myself, I think the story of Delphi over the last few years is highly encouraging, with one big exception.
If you look at progress from XE to XE2 to XE4, I think it’s pretty impressive. And cost wise, if you’re selling commercial software, the annual maintenance cost after the initial (admittedly moderately painful) purchase is low enough not to be a real consideration.
The big exception, of course, was XE3. That should never have been released – it was a step down in both quality and features, and the fact that they’re not going to release bug fixes for it is shameful.
But it’s hardly unprecedented for there to be a dip in Delphi quality (or any software product’s quality). So we’ll see what XE5 is like – having spent most of this week working on an iOs app in XE4, I’ve been hugely impressed by how easy it is and how “native” it looks. If they can pull off similar capability for Android devices, I shall be very content.
I don’t think you are cheap. I haven’t upgraded since I bought 2007 and very likely won’t ever again. The prices charged are just too much for the quality of the product (and support). It breaks my heart to say that, but it is true–in my opinion at least (and I control my pocketbook).
I don’t know any new user.
I think that Delphi is dying because:
1) There are few or no new components added in Torry last month (years) just few updates.
2) There is a big problem to find qualified Delphi programmer.
3) You will not (or it is problematic) find the newest Delphi versions in torrents. (Delphi is becoming unpopular).
4) No new users. Delphi Pro is overpriced, Starter edition is limited and costs money. Why new potential programmers should choose Delphi when there are available free IDEs, and C# and Java are more popular than Delphi. Delphi IDE cannot attract new users.
I absolutely agree with your points and they have been made over and over again for at least the last 15 years. Basically ever since the Inprise episode.
Amazingly the last time I went to a Delphi event in Germany there actually were quite a few fresh faces in attendance. I wonder where they came from?
No one has said that Embarcadero should not offer a cheap edition. But what most people are asking is a cheap edition *without any limitation*, at least for what they are interested in: “I do no use Datasnap or dbExpress, thereby it’s ok to remove them – but I need to be able to install any component I need – including db access ones – and I need the full source code (this way I get a full working Delphi for professional use for free, or almost!)”
That is what I call the “Greed Edition”. And why? Because they hope they could use it for their *professional* work, not for hobby – just paying less.
Is a $900 tool too expensive for an hobby? Maybe. Maybe not. I see hobbyists spending *thousand* of dollars for their hobbies, then they balk at software prices. Why? Where is written software should be free or cheap?
People now can take photos with any cheap phone, why spend thousand of dollars for high-end gear if you’re not a professional and don’t make money out of them? Just because you like it? Is development different?
Should Canon or Nikon sell their high-end – unlimited – cameras at the same price they sell the low-end – more limited – ones? And as soon as the low-end camera market is cannibalized by cameraphones, don’t expect high-end cameras become cheap – “to bring in more customers”. Camera maker will get rid of the low-end product and will focus on high-end ones where real money are made. If to achieve a given aim you need that equipment, people will buy it.
Is there any unlimited cheap version of Photoshop CS Suite or similar software available? No, but I know hobbyists who buy it, because it delivers unmatched great quality, features and performance.
Stop saying Delphi is not taught because it’s expensive. Delphi is no longer taught because noone cares about it anymore – and that happened because it became a subpar slow buggy tool aimed at a no longer fashionable market, the Windows RAD native desktop applications development, and little more.
Even if Embarcadero started to give away the Architect for free, school, university and young developer would keep on ignoring it happily.
It has not the appeal of C/C++ for high-end applications, it is not easy as PHP, it is not fashionable as Python, it doesn’t run on Linux or OSX. It doesn’t offer as many jobs as C# or Java or Javascript.
It’s wishful thinking believing a cheap/free version would bring back the golden days of TurboPascal. Only the same old gray Delphi developers would be happy to get what they dreamed of for free. Delphi can only survive becoming a better – albeit expensive tool – not a cheap one noone wants.
How much cheap software didn’t went anywhere simply because noone wanted to use it? Look at PaintShop Pro. When Jasc made it it was a nice, although limited – fast image editing application. Now Corel is delivering a cheap bloated crappy one – aimed at noobs-, and really, if you need a good image editing tool you have to buy Lightroom and Photoshop. No matter the how the price of PaintShop Pro is – and GIMP is not an option.
Frankly, I learnt more about Delphi reading the excellent printed manuals that came with older versions, or good books like Konopka’s about writing components. Looking at the VCL is nice when you have issue or to understand some details, but saying you can’t work without is just a lie to cover actual Delphi developers needs – otherwise, please, explain me how could all the developers who could not access their tools source code work? Reverse engineering their libs and OS? When you need to understand how a Windows or iOS API work what do you do? Look for the source code – and give up if you can’t find it – or just read the documentation? Moreover I learnt to use Delphi before the Internet and Google. Today any beginner has plenty of informations around and places to ask for help even without the VCL source.
I understand *you* need the source code. I need it too, as I buy only libraries that comes with source code for my professional work (and I’m ready to pay more for it because of the IP involved).
But please, don’t extend it as *anybody’s* need to learn Delphi, because that’s simply not true.
I do not remember Delphi 1 as being “cheap”. I remember I was astonished how much more expensive it was compared to Turbo Pascal 7 – and then I couldn’t afford Borland Pascal 7 and worked with TP7, which was much more limited (no DOS extender, no Windows support) . I could buy it then just thanks to the upgrade price – I wasn’t working then yet as a professional developer.
Didn’t you ever though maybe Delphi can be no longer a “cheap” hobbyist tool because the market changed and no longer justify it? What is better for a company, deliver a *real* professional – yet expensive – tool, and survive, or chase markets when it can’t compete and people ignore it?
There are many markets today when you can’t compete with cheap products. You have to aim at customers willingly to pay more – but you have to deliver more – or the other option is failure. Look at what Apple did when it was in trouble and Jobs was back, did it aim at the low-end, cheap, PC market or started to deliver stylish, powerful, but expensive machines? Would have it survived trying to compete with cheap PCs? Yet many people bought then even for a hobby PC – why?
Look at Kodak, do you believe it would have survived if it offered cheap films with chemical formulas? Of course not, almost nobody wanted film anymore. The only ones surviving do selling professional films to people still willingly to use them.
Embarcadero is at a crossroad, it has to decide what kind of company it wants to be. But please, stop pretending you are interested in “young beginners” when the real aim is to get a cheap Delphi for old developers who no longer want to pay that price.
Good quality products allow lower prices. The crappy ones become expensive. Nothing special about Delphi.
From the global logistics perspective Delphi is very likely performing well but this perspective does not deeply intersect with those who pay for the product. That’s what I think.
I have no problem with this.There are parts in the world like Indonesia where you need 1-3 years avg. income to buy Delphi Arch. at (the list price) if you live in the city or on the country side. I have no problem not to charge those people. For me it would make sense to move there … Paradise. I don’t need a western standard of living. Many other countries in Asia are not better off.
I can imagine that EMB’s strategy is simply. Find some people who are willing to pay for Delphi and all the other bite the dust. In the meanwhile amuse those who are dependent. Usually the SA is a good option for bigger companies because once the contract is signed usually renewal is not ‘the’ issue. The special situation in Mid-Europe is that 70 to 80% purchasing power is lost by redistributing purchasing power via the state. It’s not EMB’s job to provide a pricing according to the socialist dreams of governments in Europe. Delphi is not expensive the state loots a lot too much. Only 50% of the result of productivity increase has been put into the hands of those who do manual work and these 50% remaining have been taken away by the state. So the customer is the corporate. I don’t see an issue for EMB here. They are doing the right even if it leaves a bad taste from our perspective.
They can somehow compensate via discounts.
20 years is a long time it’s half the period after moving a way from the gold-standard and creating the illusion of wealth via lending money and inflating.
Their job is to provide a high quality product.
If the ‘poor’ quality is a result from increasing cost in every corner then socialism is the problem. Restructuring is expensive and takes too long – maybe it would have been wise to totally start from scratch in a parallel organisation and hand over the products and employ those they needed. I don’t know in how far the relation between Borland and EMB is of that kind.
Microsoft shows how it works with it’s express editions. You can’t install plugins, but that’s okay.
I never understood why Embarcadero even tried to forbid – on an EULA-base – to write software that connects to databases in the lower-priced SKU. That’s insane. You even have FULL Entity Framework support in the free Visual Studio Express.
Disabling Plugins is okay. Disabling the capability to install components in the Toolbar is okay. That forces the people using a free SKU to LEARN to use the tool.
Disabling debugging features as Embarcadero does in the starter is a crap idea too. How should young people LEARN to use that tool when they can’t even see what happens in their program at run time?
I personally have my private Visual Studio Professional subscription with MSDN besides the license from my employee. I also have a personal ReSharper license besides the one from my employee. I use that for my rare spare time at home coding on my open source pet project.
I am not the target audience for the Express editions. I was it some years ago during my studies. If I had gotten access to Delphi at that time for free, I’d probably have used that and would still be a Delphian.
Now I’m primarily a web dev, doing mainly JS in the client (also with a private WebStrom licence), and at the server mostly ASP.NET with C#. That’s because I had the opportunity to learn that stuff with capable, not too much crippled, free tools.
Seems that I’m the only one who bought the XE Starter edition, exactly because it doesn’t come with VCL sources… but then I’m using it for testing language features for FPC whereby looking into the code would be a bad idea (TM). š
And I believe the “new blood” is flowing to either Oxygene or FPC/Lazarus. At least there are new faces on the mailing lists here and then who don’t have experience with Delphi yet…
Regards,
Sven
Couldnāt agree more.
And no, no new comers to Delphi here in Portugal, that I know of. On the contrary, several very good Delphi guys that I start developing with back in Delphi 1 have gone to other solutions.
I am still in Delphi, but I freelance, so I can choose what tools I want to use.
You are right. Delphi is very expansive, I am stuck in D2007, because itās impossible to upgrade at those prices, the freelance jobs donāt pay that good in this economy.
Now I have a problem. Several of my clients need tools and solutions to mobil (IOs and Android). Delphi is a good solution, only because of cross platform, and a smaller learning curve. But between development tools and hardware itās very expansive.
One good thing though you are not the only one talking about this subject, and in the past few month itās more and more a subject.
Embarcadero must pay some attention to this, and with more people talking about it and raising the issues that you just do, they must, because if they donāt I really donāt see a XE6 or 7 in the horizon
I usually disagree with your general pessimistic tone :-), but in the Starter Edition topic you are spot on. My opinion is that the current Starter edition should be free, and that there should be an “educational” license that is basically Pro at a cheaper price (say, Starter price) with different use terms.
We are not getting any new Delphi developers because there are lots of really cool alternatives, specially the MS free offerings.
Cheers!
Academic pricing has been available for a long time.
I may be wrong, but I don’t think he means pricing for educational establishments per se (but it raises a related point: how many educational establishments are taking advantage of that currently available pricing?)
Not sure if the academic pricing extends to the institutions themselves. I think there might be some rigid and maybe even unreasonable licensing involved.
I’m fairly sure that an institution can use an academic license for the purposes of delivering education, they just can’t use it for projects not related to that delivery. i.e. they can use an academic license to teach students how to develop a course scheduling/management system, but they can’t actually develop such a system for their own actual use without a “full” license. Which is not unreasonable.
What is perhaps unreasonable however is that academic licenses can’t be upgraded – on any terms – to full licenses. So if a student buys an academic license for their study and then decides once their study is complete that they wish to buy a full license then as far as EMBT are concerned they are a new user.
Yet another example of the “closed door” policy, setting a nice, high bar on the price of entry. Someone has to pay for all those oak panels and leather wingbacks I suppose (extending the “Gentlemen’s Club” metaphor). š
I am working for a university and academic license is completely out of question due to its limited terms. BTW, I get a VS Ultimate with 2 years MSDN subscription for less than the price to upgrade the RAD Studio and even myself had switched to C# longer time ago… The buggy Delphi didn’t justify for its price.
I know three “new” Delphi users. They learned from scratch at my previous employer.
Cool. š
I don’t doubt it. I may hire a developer or two and have them learn Delphi, but it is possible that I may be the _only_ remaining company doing active Delphi development in my country.
The real question is, how many _existing_ Delphi developers have your previous employer hired? (assuming you are not talking about Embarcadero!)
I have not upgraded since XE. I love Delphi, though the IDE seems to keep growing defects.
I know that there is a new market arena of interest to EMBT: mobile. But the manta that mobile is king, and the desktop is dying is just silly. The desktop is alive and well, and many users are not even considering a move to mobile, not even to supplement desktop access.
So from where I sit, XE2, 3, 4, and now 5, are all focused on the mobile platform(s), and offer little to nothing for desktop users. By most accounts, the longstanding desktop defects remain unattended, as do those in the VCL.
VCL and desktop is where I have made my living since 1995, and there is no sign of a change in the market area I service.
I still love Delphi, but what have they done for me lately? Nada.
Well, I’m an ex Delphi developer who is looking to get back to Delphi. I hate the bloat and clumsiness of .NET and Java tools and libraries. For me it’s either native (Qt/Go/Delphi) or scripting languages (Javascript/Python).
A native Delphi for Android is quite compelling, but I need an Indy license, otherwise I’ll probably just stay with Qt.
We get a new Delphi user almost every year when we get a new trainee since our main product is written and actively developed in Delphi.
I agree there prolly are not that many new users but not seeing them at some presentation does not mean they don’t exist. Naturally these presenations (not only for Delphi) are visited by the same people and seeing new faces there is rather uncommon.
However I am totally with you that not having a low (or no?) cost version for the hobbyist is bad.
Obviously a new face at this year’s event would not mean a new user recruited in the past year, but you might expect to see some new faces if there have been any significant new users coming onboard in the past 2-3 years. Even worse, when you talk to the familiar faces some of them – like me – admit to being present only out of curiosity as even they are not actively using Delphi any more.
You are lucky to be able to find people willing to train in Delphi. Both my present and past employers could say the same thing (apart from the fact that we don’t/didn’t take on trainees), I mean the part about main products being actively developed in Delphi. That is, right up to the point where the decision was taken that this would no longer be the case.
Be careful that you properly understand what Embarcadero mean by “native”.
In the case of Android they mean that they produce unmanaged code, targetting the NDK. But despite what they would have you believe, this is not the native environment for Android. Google themselves advise against compiling for the NDK unless absolutely necessary (and they further say that it rarely, if ever should be necessary).
I am also not sure exactly what this means in terms of any broader support that Delphi for Android can offer.
Oxygene, for example, targets Java. Since Java happens to be the native Android environment this means that Android support is just one of the Java platforms you can target, and the Java edition of Oxygene comes with specific, additional support for Android because it is obviously a Java platform of specific interest.
I suspect that Delphi for Android is just that: Just Android. If any other mobile platform comes along based on Java, you would be able to target it with Oxygene I think, but not Delphi. This should be confirmed, but since Delphi targets the NDK, not Java, I am fairly certain that this is correct.
And of course, in neither Android nor iOS is your application UI at all native, unless you are invoking bits of the native UX via the API, such as the “date picker” example. i.e. a franken-UI.
On iOS I have seen it observed that FireMonkey applications perform very badly. This might be why Embarcadero have been forced to target unmanaged code on Android.
As I say, be careful to research your options carefully.
If your fondness for Delphi was the language, Oxygene can satisfy that hankering with bells on. As a language it really is a better Delphi than Delphi, but it is still ObjectPascal. And since it is hosted within the Visual Studio shell, you still have a first class, Windows based IDE, albeit not Delphi flavoured so some adjustment may be required. But it’s better than having to deal with Eclipse. imho.
Sounds like the term “native” is being abused here.
Yep, but not by me. š
Android studio is now based on IntelliJ and comes with a visual designer. No need to use Eclipse.
As for Oxygene, I really have a problem with their attitude towards documentation. A wiki where you keep getting directed to “not yet documented” pages doesn’t cut it.
I’m a very happy Delphi XE Starter user. I’m not a professional developer, but an enthousiast hobby developer. I think Delphi XE Starter is very powerful. There are several free component libraries that fill in the gaps with Delphi Pro (GExperts, Nexus DB Embedded, …). I suppose a professional developer would not be happy with that, but for me it’s fine. Only (small) critic : they removed some debugging features, and if a beginner needs something then it’s good debugging !!
For learning Delphi I read some books, but I never look at component source code. I bought some TMS components so I have the source, looked at it once just to see that it is of no use to me. To make it more concrete : when I would like to write a “Hello World” application I need to know how to use ShowMessage, I don’t need to now how ShowMessage is implemented.
Soitjes.
Well, *some*one has to pay for the “Grand David I World Tour of [insert year]”, don’t they? š
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHUowgu-51I
(Chinese Internationale – Rock version by Tang Dynasty)
That’s the result.
A great song in any language, of course. ;). But i’m not sure what your point is in this context?
Do you think he collects snow globes or coffee mugs from every city he visits?
I guess sometimes people should read the licenses. Even many MS educational/academic licenses do not allow to use the software for personal use – including professional use outside the education institution (see http://www.microsoft.com/education/en-us/buy/licensing/Pages/home_use.aspx).
Only an “HUP” licenses allows for this.
Could Emb allow academic licenses to be upgraded to full ones at the upgrade prices? Sure, and it would not be a bad idea. But when Emb reduced the upgrade windows for commercial customers, almost noone complained – why?
Hobbyist and small business may not want to upgrade to each and every version, but the fact that if an hobbyist don’t upgrade at least every three year is forced then to pay the full license didn’t worry almost anyone, why? These facts are telling me we’re not really talking about hobbyists.
You are conveniently ignoring the many times that I for one have complained about precisely that issue. Then again, I suppose in many ways I am “almost no-one”. š
And it might surprise you to learn that many people I speak to still aren’t even aware of the reduced upgrade window, especially those previously seduced onto SA who have no need to check the prices and upgrade criteria each year (well, every 6 months of late).
I seem to remember that when Embarcadero bought the company/product now sold as FireDAC the developer, when asked why the are so many good russian Delphi developers he said something like : it is easy to get an free(illegal?) copy of Delphi over there so many Kids tried it out and stayed with it making for a much larger base compared to other countries where the Kids would have to spend a years allowance on it.
Exactly I complained, you did – but how many others? People on SA are hardly students or hobbyists – so when we talk about non-professional developers needs we are really caring about them, or we just think about ourselves? Why the lack of a cheap version dramatic, while the small update window is not?
As an hobbyist, for example, I prefer to buy more expensive camera and lenses and use them for several years, than buy cheap camera and lenses every year.
It doesn’t impact me, but I think a true hobbyists is more damaged by the three-release update window than the lack of cheap limited version. Paying $400-500 every four-five years could be acceptable to many hobbyists (but those wanting the latest and “greatest” just to play with), and even some business, being forced in a every-three-releases-or-you’re-out is a much worser approach to keep less “rich” customers.
Probably in the attempt to gain more short-term revenues Emb lost more in the long term because of more customers deciding to leave the boat.
Then there is the “entry” barrier. Here if you want a cheap version some limits have to be applied. I understand such a product is not always what someone dreams of – but license limitations (“only FOSS projects!”) are very difficult to enforce.
Maybe they could just add part of the VCL source, and not everything, enough to let people give a look to the code to learn – block plug-ins (like VS Express does) and so on.
The “funny” part is that if Delphi had more to offer in higher SKUs, there would be less “basic” features to remove from lower ones. That’s what VS can do, for example, but not Delphi.
Instead, because it offers – but mobile – more or less the same feature set of Delphi 3, the available features to be removed may reduce a lot a cheap edition appeal compared to other availabe products that improved much more.
Sure, there is multiplatform, there is FireMonkey which were not in D3, but they are hardly features making customer switch to an higher SKU, due to their poor implementation and appeal – I can’t really see an hobbyist or student wanting to learn MacOSX development wishing to do it with Delphi, even with a free/cheap one. They will learn Objective-C and use XCode, often because of “peer pressure”. Same for Linux, they will use GCC or Python, try to enter a Linux forum and say you’re gonna to use Pascal… especially when you’re young, peer pressure can’t be understimate when it comes to make choices. That’s one of the biggest issues for Delphi – it is no longer fashionable, and not because its price.
Emb still thinks that the differentiating feature is C/S development (see the attempt to change the Pro license!), but that was ok in 1995, not in 2013.
Thereby IMHO first Delphi has to offer more and return to be appealing, then it could release a cheap version with less basic limitations. Right now there is very little space to release such a version without killing a lot of the Pro sales, and I guess that’s something Emb can’t sustain. But if the product isn’t really improved in many ways, there’s no way to sustain it – and a cheap version of subpar tools is not appealing to anybody – but for people suffering of “Delphi addiction”.
This I think is the crux of your post:
Or put another way, Embarcadero are still working to a 1990’s mindset. Any discussion of more modern, innovative approaches and the merits of any in particular over any other is a waste of hot air while they are stuck in that attitude.
Delphi / RAD pricing model is now #1 issue in this whole product line.
The model was not changed since Delphi 1/2.
More features = higher price. It’s a good model for Enterprise clients where people who are a decision makers don’t know why Delphi IDE has nothing to do with hard disk interface.
But ISV usually are very aware of value vs price and know that they don’t need a whole bunch of features included in Enterprise / Architect editions.
It’s sad that as a former Delphi developer I don’t see a point in using Delphi anymore.
For portable Pascal I can use FPC / Lazarus (price = 0 USD).
For portable enterprise desktop applications I can use Java / Swing (price = 0 USD).
For background processing I can use Visual C++ Express (price = 0 USD, OpenMP/profiler/latest Boost incl.) or Code::Blocks/MinGW or Eclipse or Netbeans.
For Windows desktop applications I can use Visual C# Express (price = 0 USD).
For webdev I can use… IntelliJ IDEA, Netbeans, Aptana, Eclipse etc… (price almost always starts from 0 USD).
Where is the market for crippleware-like Starter edition or more expensive editions of RAD XE?
My advice for Embarcadero – start to sell cheap one-purpose developer tools (like PhpStorm, PyCharm, WebStorm) – for Windows, for iOS, for Android, for databases (you can split by local, C/S, NoSQL, cloud).
There are a lot of developers who have never developed for iOS/Android/cloud, believe me or not…
Using this model you can provide users with source version of VCL / anything you add to raw compiler / starting from cheapest edition..
It’s certainly an unenviable position that Embarcadero find themselves in.
I’ve used Delphi since D1 and did think that it was in it’s slow death throws, that was until Firemonkey.
I’m a fan of the technology, thou I’m looking forward to it being far more robust that it currently is. I understand that the drive for sales means that the quality of what they currently have is a distance 2nd in the priority list, to adding new features. Essentially so they can justify charging people for a new version.
Their whole income model is archaic and in some ways is the route of a lot of their problems. There are far better ways to get customers to pay these days which would drive new sales, keep existing customers happy and have a continuing income stream.
I’ve personally recently started two new projects, that would both suit using Delphi (Neither currently has any Delphi projects). One is in the Mobile arena, the other in a quite a high profile product.
Given the current Pricing/Attitude, there is no way I can get Delphi a look in.
Meanwhile I was at Microsoft the other day and they are offering all the development help they can for the 2nd project for free.
IMHO I think that Embarcadero have done half the job required to save Delphi. They have given the development tools a whole new lease of life, and a future, with the ability to create multi-platform applications from the some source code. What they also need to do is redo the business, turn their pricing, marketing, attitude, outlook around and embrace a new world because otherwise it doesn’t matter how good the tool is, users will continue to jump ship and new users will be harder to entice.
That’s not a future, that’s a fool’s paradise. Beware the light at the end of the tunnel… it may be an on-coming train! š
But even if, somehow, Embarcadero got it right with FireMonkey (which I dispute), here’s the problem with the line of thought you were on…. it all hinges on that final observation:
The problem being, that with FireMonkey being the revolution that it is – right or wrong – then XE4, when the iOS support first appeared as an officially released feature, was precisely the time that this would have happened. It was the perfect opportunity to re-align the product line in ways that made sense for the modern developer tool marketplace, acknowledging the very real competition from free/low-cost alternatives.
If that were ever going to happen it would have happened already. It didn’t.
Talking of the “Death of Delphi” is of course ridiculous. Languages never die, they just become irrelevant.
Sure, I guess MS offered everything for free as long as your project is bound to SQL Server, Office, SharePoint, Exchange and some other MS software your customer will dearly pay for. And will you give away your software for free? Is so difficult to understand MS can undercut prices because it has several other revenues streams, while Emb doesn’t?
What’s the problem in paying for software, as long as it brings you what you really need? The problem of Delphi is not the price. It’s much deeper – features and quality. IMHO there’s no way it could target customers who don’t want to pay for the product – what’s the advantage? One billion users paying nothing means no revenues (unless they start to ask 30% of each application you sell as Apple does). It has to target users willingly to pay, but they want something back for their money, and Emb is often failing to give that. Firemonkey is an example, an ill born buggy library delivering subpar GUI on any OS and bloating your executable with GUI code that is already available in the OS.
I think you hit the nail on the head, LDS. The reason that MS can give away their developer products so cheaply is because they have additional revenue streams. They don’t make their money on the developer tools – they make it on the products and subsequent licensing that, ultimately, get sold to the clients of the developers.
Emb offers tools that can leverage those products offered by MS and Oracle…but, they don’t sell them themselves. When .Net was released, Borland freaked as MS was not willing to put them on equal footing and give them full access to MS treasure trove. Delphi lagged and had to be built on published specs … not pre-releases of the latest .NET frameworks.
Borland was also obsessed with the whole Application Lifecycle thing…they forgot what made the company and diverted valuable resources away from their core product to pursue something entirely else. Even as their development team and products were sold to Embarcadero, the mindset that got them there didn’t change.
I don’t know what the internal politics were at the company that sent many talented developers off to newer pastures. I do see once established Delphi stalwarts now bad mouthing the company and product at every opportunity and it saddens me. Business relationships fail – strategies change. Make the best of the new market you find yourself in and let go of the hate.
Emb has decided to take on iOS with XE4. Guess what? It works. Yes, there are some rough edges. But, heck yes, we can develop for Windows, iOS and Mac using the same source. FireMonkey isn’t perfect and needs more better documentation and an ecosystem to convince people to participate. That hasn’t yet happened. Will it? We’ll see.
As for XE5 providing Android via the NDK. That might be the case. And, I would suspect that if this is the case, given that no information has been publicly published, true or not, stating this may be a violation of the NDA signed by yourself or someone you spoke with.
What I do know is that if I can develop “enterprise” apps for iOS and Android using Delphi using the same source code, then I can complete my mission. FMX can open other avenues I can even get it to on the web using Web.FMX (screw that crap from Chad Hower and associates…what’s it called??? Put it to pasture. MobileStudio and ElevateWeb seem to do the web far better.) Haven’t fully explored that avenue…just like what I see.
I don’t profess to know what Emb needs to do to become relevant among indie developers, but I have some ideas which I won’t reiterate here.
Bottom line is I still love using Delphi – it’s not love/hate (except I hate the effect on my wallet). I like FMX despite the learning curve and limited documentation (HATED CLX). I do miss the vibrant developer community that once existed before Borland/Inprise screwed it up. I, like many, do get irritated at the obnoxious comments some TeamB members make and wish the Emb developers, themselves, were more involved like in the old days. TeamB isn’t all bad – there are some that try (and, succeed) in being helpful. But, elitist comments by some really suck.
Lot said here…we shall see what happens and whether EMB actually reads the comments posted by fans, former fans and those that hate because they can and acts on it.
“The next version of Delphi will include a new compiler for the Android ARM platform. It is a native code compiler, producing binary code (and not Java Dalvik bytecode). Up to now, the only option for native Android apps was using C++ and some low level code.”
“Delphi for Android requires both the NDK and the SDK ”
If the Delphi Product Manager is talking about it, does this not constitute being “publicly published” ? If you don’t think it makes it “true” what does this say about your level of trust in the Product Manager ?
I haven’t signed an NDA and haven’t spoken to anyone that has; I just like to keep informed. It helps when forming an opinion. š