Delphi 2005 Architect Review

Delphi has grown up since it launched nearly ten years ago. The latest version - Delphi 2005 provides support for developing Win32 and .NET applications as well as now supporting the C# language as well. There are many enhancements to almost all areas of the new release with the main goal of increasing developer productivity.

IDE enhancements - multiple targets, multiple languages
The main changes in the Delphi 2005 IDE is now support for Delphi Win32, Delphi for .NET and also C# support development. This seems like a good move by Borland as many of the developers I have spoken to want to develop for .NET, are not sure if they will use Delphi or C#, and to add to that they still have Win32 applications to support. It seems that Borland have been smart to provide a solution that will work for existing Delphi developers no matter what development path they take.

Unit Testing
Delphi 2005 includes wizards to incorporate automated unit testing within your applications with support for DUnit for Win32 applications and NUnit for .NET applications. Using the wizards it was painless to create a unit testing project for an existing project. The integrated unit testing simply worked and after some quite simple questions you can create a blank unit test classes against classes in an existing project.

The Code Editor
For those who have developed with Delphi since version one, the editor has remained consistent, and hasn't deviated from its original design until Delphi 8. Most of the improvements that Delphi developers have seen have been in the area of code-completion and other productivity enhancements. The editor in Delphi 2005 is much slicker than previous versions and handles things like code folding, displaying of line numbers, better handing of code completion, and the very nice history of changes. The biggest improvement in the editor is its refactoring support. This is solid improvement over previous Delphi code editors.

Web Applications
There were many subtle things that needed to be improved in order to do real ASP.NET development using the Delphi product. Little things such as the ability to edit template columns in a DataGrid or DataList or the ability to convert a HTML control into a server control. The good news is that Delphi 2005 now supports these changes. The new structure editor also provides a display of the HTML editor in an easy to use way, and the code completion features of HTML, ASPX and CSS pages are extremely helpful. These little things improve the development time of an ASP.NET application, and I'm glad that there is also improved stability in the Web editors. At last Delphi 2005 becomes a good tool to create ASP.NET Web applications.

For Win32, Delphi still includes support for Intraweb for developing Web Application, but Delphi 2005 also includes a .NET version so that existing Intraweb applications can take advantage of the .NET framework.

Database Development
The notable improvements in Delphi database development include an improved Data Explorer to allow testing stored procedures, migration between Borland Data Provider data and even database metadata modification amongst others. Much of my work with .NET applications has been against SQL Server and it is refreshing to now see design-time support for the SqlConnection component.

For VCL developers on .NET you will be pleased to know that the dbGO ADO components have finally been ported to VCL.NET, to assist in porting your VCL/ADO applications to .NET.

Win32 Development
Delphi Win32 developers don't get left behind with this release and for many companies developing for Win32, this will be their first real upgrade for some years. The main thing Win32 Delphi developers will receive are improvement in the productivity gains of the IDE such as refactoring, the Unit test wizards, Star Team Integration and the Database explorer.

Integration
Another important part of the Delphi 2005 experience is the level of integration with other tools in the system such as the unit testing with DUnit and NUnit, Star Team for source control as well as tightly integrating the Borland Janeva product to support calling Java and CORBA solutions easily.

Object Pascal Language Changes
The most notable language change is the introduction of the for..in loop construct. This is similar to the foreach construct that you see in languages like C#. Luckily this change is not limited to the .NET framework and can be used in your Win32 applications as well.

ECO 2 - The Gold Nugget of Delphi 2005
The most outstanding feature in Delphi 2005 is its Model Driven Architecture Solution (MDA) called ECO 2. ECO 2 allows you to design classes using Borland's Together technology, and then use the classes against a persistence store such as a Microsoft SQL Server, or other supported databases such as Oracle, Interbase, DB2 or even an XML file. What makes this so good is that it gives you a persistence layer with Model-View-Controller support. When you consider that you can define your classes to store their objects history as well, and perform undo operations against changes in your objects you begin to see the true power and value of ECO. Delphi 2005 and ECO create a good foundation to build commercial applications easily. In Delphi 2005, ECO 2 also provides support for creating ECO enabled ASP.NET pages and ASP.NET Web Services.

Another powerful feature of ECO 2 is the ability to reverse engineer an existing database. Testing against an internal database I had developed proved quite simple and once the database was reverse engineered, working against the data within the object model was an absolute breeze. Within roughly five minutes I had a running application showing both one-to-many and many-to-many relationships. Pretty powerful stuff.

Conclusion
Overall Delphi 2005 is a solid product with great productivity enhancements over previous versions. After using Delphi 2005 you can feel that the product speeds your development through its support for refactoring, unit testing and ECO 2 support as well as its multiple languages. I think that Delphi 2005 is good value for existing Delphi developers and also developers of .NET systems who might want to take advantage of the MDA features of Delphi 2005.

Delphi 2005 Architect
Company: Borland
Price: AU$4315 (professional edition - AU$1437)
Platforms: Intel® Pentium® II/450 MHz or better, 256 MB of RAM (512 MB recommended) 800MB disk space required, Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Windows XP Professional, Windows 2000, SVGA or higher-resolution monitor (XGA recommended)

Glenn Stephens designs and develops applications for various platforms, and has been developing and designing software solutions for over 15 years. He is the author of the Tomes of Kylix - The Linux API. Feel free to contact Glenn at glenn@glennstephens.com.au