To followup on my last email, I spent a number of hours with the new Delphi
for PHP last night, and I have to generally say I'm very impressed. This is
a very radical departure from normal PHP development in that the way that
I've developed PHP applications around Firebird in the past has been to take
an open source framework such as Code Igniter, and just build my PHP classes
into it.

From experience working with other PHP developers, they are used to
generating .PHP files manually, understanding the INI setups of their PHP
installation, ensuring that all Mods are installed in Apache that is
required, etc. It’s a very *NIX way of thinking. Delphi for PHP is a very
different beast. The attempt to make an entire RAD toolset that encompasses
all of this 'manual' work is admirable. However the fact that most PHP
developers have setup their environments from hand, and have had years of
experience working with other classes, PEAR, etc. and are used to a manual
way of doing this, may be a hard sell for CodeGear.

I think that a Delphi (Object Pascal) developer may have more luck in
transitioning to D4PHP than a PHP developer, however I'd love to be proved
wrong. I'm going to try and do this myself, but it’s a bit scary. The
documentation that came with the ESD download version is buried in amongst
Help files, and it took me a while to find where the Sample code was (its in
\CodeGear\Delphi for PHP\VCL\samples which I didn't expect to find there.

But when you throw a simple grid tool together over a database, it all seems
like the effort to come to grips with this different way of thinking is
worth it. I mean I can't do that sort of stuff manually in PHP without
investing weeks of time, dealing with AJAX, DHTML, CSS, etc. Now I've been
around long enough to know that what glistens in software isn't always gold,
and can be a hell of a lot of powder coating over a lot of work to
implement. But I expect that if a developer is willing to invest time in
re-thinking their PHP approach, and once there is a lot of 3rd party
documentation, books, etc. to help them embrace this approach, this could be
a big winner for CodeGear.

Sometimes I hate to be an early adopter, but it may be worth the investment.
I'll let you know as I progress further.

Myles


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