Soapbox: Solving Problems with Love

Correspondent from New York

Thinking outside the Box

I love Delphi and so should you. There's a new blog in town and I'm sure everyone will approve of it. It's called WeLoveDelphi (source).

Some clarifications about this blog:

- Trolling and speaking up against trolling in the Embarcadero and other newsgroups. Ask yourself are you not sick of abusive posts on the newsgroups? I'm sure if you were a good Samaritan you would also break-up the abusive war-of-words rather than turn a blind eye while someone's else character gets questioned, deeply insulted, reviled and deeply hurt in the name of defending Delphi? Which side do you take - the side of the victim or the side of the agressor? Where is justice? If there is no  justice, this blog will take the side of the oppressed.

- This blog writes factually accurate articles about things affecting Delphi businesses - loss of revenue, loss of jobs and loss of opportunities.

Your correspondent is a licensee of kbmMemTable and kbmMW (i.e., kbmMemTable professional is included with kbmMW) but never used it. Even your correspondent's friends who brought it could not use it. They moved over to RemObjects.

I Love to solve problems, Join us in this debate to solve problems

To make this blog better, here are some problems which can be solved with love:

- What solution can you give for this pay-per-download issue, when your correspondent (and presumably, the other developers on this blog) is licensee for many years but others (approx 300,000 downloaders) can download for free?

- What solution can you give for loss of revenue for KBM products due to illegal downloading? Can you secure your download site better? Can you watermark your codes?

- What solution can you give towards poor Delphi compiler performance, constant bugs and issues - not to mention multiple Delphi versions (6, 7, NET, '05, '07, '09, '10, XE)  leading to continuous annual payments? This feels short of a pyramid scheme. You pay lot of people at the top and only those at the top of the pyramid make money.

- What solution can you give towards illegal download sites?

- Can you open-source your product or give it for free? Lots of people will love you - but the day you stop maintain people will move on.

- What reasonable SOAP (or standards compliant) solution can your kbmMW solution can you provide? Have kbmMW SOAP gone for verification testing and are those results published?

- Delphi financial information missing from your website. Can you compare and contrast solution from kbmMW vs. RemObjects?

- What solution can you give towards cross-platform clients?

- When is 64bits Delphi going to be generally available and for release? And what cost with kbmMW (along with UI, Database, and so on)?

- Linking 3rd party: lots of goodness on C++ too. Your correspondent use the same components as Symantec, Kaspersky and others use.

Your correspondent is not unreasonable to ask these questions which can be solved lovingly.

New Wine Bottles Needed

The reasons to rewrite a Delphi to C# application are multiple. You put old wine in old wine-bottles and new wine in new-wine-bottles. For instance, there is decade-long IntraWeb problem leading and seriously, Delphi is good for Desktop apps, not Web. There is need for mobile support. I'm sure you also want to make mobile apps too. 

Friends don't let Friends make Bad Websites

I'm sure you love Delphi, can you share the love and warmth of Delphi? Given that Delphi is a torch, the light in dark times? This blog published an older review (source) three years ago.

- Can you please tell where is Jasmine components? Did you know that there are several obituaries for Mr. H. Palmer? (RIP) Did you try calling Mr. Palmer?

- Media room -- no media since last reported maybe 3 + 3 years ago. Okay, so there is some new media (source). There are no Case Studies.

- Resize issue and old logos used. CodeGear is no longer in business. Can you please get Embarcardero new logos?

- Change your copyright notice from 2010 to 2011. The trick everyone uses is to use the PHP date function and embed a moving copyright notice (e.g., when year 2014 comes, the PHP reads the date and prints it on the copyright notice. So it changes automatically).

- Remove all old info DeerSoft, Dbisam III. Nobody uses so old products.

- Weirdness - Windows 2500. Is this a new version of Windows? Do you update your website since newer versions of Delphi support Windows XP (and above)? Delphi XE no longer supports the older Windows NT/ME/95/98.

- Remove outdated links. It seems nobody uses the Yahoo groups anymore (source). I'm sure you would get scared when there is not even 1 support post for the whole of Year 2011.

Interesting problem and Dark clouds.

Your correspondent describes a problem which exists no Delphi solution: Transaction processing. This is implemented in NET/IIS/C#/SOAP and MOM stack. We went full 64-bit stack (Windows 2008 x64, IIS/64, C#-64 with Windows 7 x64 clients, Office 2010 64-bits) and no legacy. We discussed with a CIO of a huge company to use all 64-bits and move-over all codes. This meant we had to rewrite huge chunks of Delphi codes to C#/64-bits. The solution was deployed few months ago. I really wished that Delphi could perform well, but it was not the case. It is not unreasonable to ask for all 64-bits from larger companies.

If you can give a loving Delphi solution which makes both business-sense and commercial-sense, please say so. In mean time, I have to eat, I have to sleep, I have to work for a living. This is where words meet mammon: I do not wish to steal, so I (and my friends) license all original. I do not wish to lie and give hundreds of excuses for Delphi deficiencies, so we moved over, and so on.

TED Revisited: Solutions worth spreading

There's a nice website called TED. If you can brainstorm a solution which can lead out of temptation this mess, please blog it down. If you can give a working solution to the above problems let everyone know it.

The world lives and breathes by working solutions.

Update 1:

The person who wrote the blog "WeLoveDelphi" is anonymous. Since the owner of that blog was misidentified as Mr. Kim Bo Madsen since he raised this blog on the newsgroup (source). Even if the facts are  as per his words "misguided", the website on this blog refers to Mr. Kim Bo Madsen's Component4Developer's website and some points on the "WeLoveDelphi" website. They are equally valid and not misguided.


Update 2:
Article correction. There was a typo on this article which states newer versions of Delphi supports XP-only. It should be: Delphi XE supports Unicode and hence, no longer support older non-Unicode APIs. That means that Windows 95/98/ME are not supported with Delphi XE. Windows NT 2000 shipped with Professional, Server, Advanced Server and Datacenter Edition. One wonders what kind OS does "Windows 2500" mean?

Third-party vendors whose APIs depends on Windows XP as the base-OS. Try getting DeveloperExpress or LMD to support Windows 2000. Try their latest binaries on Windows 2000 and be surprised.