Well I received my downloadable Delphi for PHP today. I haven't had a huge
amount of time to play with it, but there are some very impressive features,
but a couple of 'critical' missing features for me.

Firstly the biggest attraction that I have for this is the grid tool. They
include a grid tool that is not unlike a typical Delphi grid, that you
associate with a Datasource. There is a facility in the IDE called the
'Data Explorer' that allows you to literally drag & drop tables, fields,
stored procs, etc. from your database onto the grid and build up a really
nice looking AJAX enabled grid. My hope was that I could build these grids
and literally slap them into my existing PHP apps and get the whole thing to
integrate.

Well not exactly. The biggest problem is that this 1.0 release, from what I
can see, only allows you to work with either MySQL or Interbase databases
(that's IB7 from the look of it). You can connect a database via ADODB to
Firebird, and they even have a Firebird listing in the options of databases
to support, but no support for FB in the IDE under the Data Explorer.
Bummer.

So it looks interesting, certainly seems to have the general features you
would want for this. But trying to work out how to use it in conjunction
with my existing PHP frameworks, etc. is going to be a chore. I just hope
this isn't a 'square peg in a round hole' solution, that I'll spend more
time trying to make it work with my existing code, than the benefits that it
will bring. I guess time will tell.

Myles


============================
Myles Wakeham
Director of Engineering
Tech Solutions US, Inc.
Scottsdale, Arizona USA
Phone (480) 451-7440
www.techsol.org