Re: NewEra vs VB/Delphi

In article <Lc3qz0ElJP0B092yn@kcbbs.gen.nz>, kerry@kcbbs.gen.nz says... >Delphi 3 has some way cool 3-tier/automatic failover recovery/extremely >lite installation requirements/web connectivity/ActiveX ability/yada yada >yada. It's also a real OO language (I'm not trying to imply that NE isn't). This response has turned into a tools ramble. Apologies. Last time I looked at Delphi (Delphi 2), it had some oddities that interfered with me really getting into it. (Also, there's the oddity that the desktop edition couldn't use generic ODBC. You could get around this in Delphi 1, but they apparently got rid of that loophole in Delphi 2, at least so far as I can determine.) (Sheesh, you can even use ODBC with the Visual Basic 5.0 Learning Edition, though I'm not going to touch on the quality of that tool. :-) The one that really confused me, being a C++ programmer, was that you apparently had to manually call the constructor for an object, rather than having the constructor automatically being called; also, that you apparently had to manually call the superclass constructor. When I think "constructor", I don't think "function declared as a constructor that I have to manually type in the code to call." I think in terms of C++, in terms of a function that gets called always no matter what I type. Some of this may be due to the basic semantics of Pascal. (Pascal has no inline var mechanism, as C++ has inline variable declaration. You can declare int i; anywhere in a C++ program. Pascal seems fundamentally structured against this.) Given my level of expertise in Delphi, I may very well be confused. To be honest, I am on the level of a "Teach Yourself Delphi in 21 days" person rather than anything resembling a Delphi expert. >A big question is: Does NE have a future? Another big question: Does Delphi and Borland have a future? Delphi was for a time almost the only thing keeping Borland afloat; since the release of C++ Builder, perhaps this has changed. Borland has been having difficulties for several years now; I love the Delphi programming environment (I wish Visual Basic 4 and Visual Basic 5 had taken more ideas from it, as it seems Powersoft and Symantec have done), but it being a Borland product makes it hard to sell to my company. Of the environments I've seen, I would probably vote Optima++ (or Power++, as recently renamed) for a development environment. Uses C++ as the programming language, and has a Delphi-like interface. I have not seen C++ Builder, so I cannot adequately compare the two. The Java programming environments are not yet there. (Haven't seen Supercede's database version.) Symantec's Visual Cafe Pro, though currently the best visual development tool (IMO), still has some serious deficiencies in developing database applications - the most severe being that you -have- to use their dbAnywhere server, the second most severe being that you have to buy an upgraded dbAnywhere server if you want to deploy anything developed in the Cafe Pro environment. (You get something like a two-user license with Visual Cafe Pro, which obviously won't cut it when it comes to distribute your applet or application.) PowerJ (Powersoft's Java product), at least as in the latest pre-release, doesn't seem to compete well with Visual Cafe Pro; it doesn't appear to do layout managers, which (if you really want to support multiple platforms) is what you want to use. If you don't care about multiple platforms, it could well become your tool of choice - though it seems slow, compared to Visual Cafe Pro. Again, apologies for rambling, for those who had to download this ramble/rant over a 2400 baud modem. :-( -- William Harris