0x01: RAPID APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT

Having been a proponent of Visual Basic for some years I believe that I know it pretty well and it has been my primary choice for Desktop and Rapid Application Development. By this I mean the usual Sales Systems, Personnel Management and stiff like that. No more, my friends, no more! I have discovered an alternative that has pretty much blown me away.

Step right up Borland Delphi! Yes siree! As my good friend Owino would say, this is the Mutha! I installed Delhi 5 some two weeks ago and was astounded to discover that it hooked into everything already on Gathoni, which is impressive considering that Delphi 5 is some 3 or 4 years old or so!

In short I am completely blown away! Delphi 5 epitomizes ease of use and sheer power and after 2 weeks of tinkering with it I am shamelessly turning my back on my Visual Basic and will only return when a gun is held to my head! The fact that I have come into possession of Delphi 6 is a sign of nothing but good things to come. In short if you want to develop anything from a batch file to a web server Delphi MBELE!

0x02: DATABASES: When the question of database arises the passions of people come into play. Jamaas have almost punched me in defence of their tools of trade. Personally I have a variety of opinions having sampled a variety of them so I shall mention each in passing:

SQL Server: This is my database of choice. Simple to use, robust, powerful, excellent performance and just about every aspect can be accessed using code. I particularly say this in reference to SQL 2000, one of the best products out of Redmond.
Oracle: Undeniably has plenty of power but it has got to have the most mediocre interfaces that I have ever laid eyes on. Version 8 at any rate! Difficult to use would be a sheer understatement, and anything that goes on to do stupid things like add keys, relationships and constraints that I did not ask for without having the courtesy to tell me is simply asking for trouble!
Sybase Adaptive Server Anywhere: Modeled on Oracle and fascinatingly cluttered. You even have to configure the stupid thing to run as a service by specifying all manner of parameters that only the entire Sybase Development team would know. Redeemed by features such as support for Java Objects within the database as well as the ability to run on a PDA. This latter feature is the only reason I keep it around.
Access: For those small scale jobs the choices are rather limited. However if some clown switches off his machine without closing the application the database corruption has to be seen to be believed!
mySQL: Excellent. Just excellent. However you need to be adept at your SQL to use it to its full! NASA, I understand, use this thing!
InterBase: Was introduced to it at the same time as Delphi and already am impressed. Did I mention it was made by Borland? It would seem that some departments of the US Government make use of this. Extremely powerful and capable database supporting features such as BLOBs and replication. And knowing my brethren who hate spending money on anything but beer, there is an Open Source version that costs NO MONEY! This is a simple 5 MB download that has all the power we all need from a database. No, not a mistake. 5 MB. It expands to just over 11 MB and can run as a service or as an application.
Paradox: Old as it may be it seems to be quite the baby of those who follow the Delphi route. Seeing as I have only just come across it it would be premature to say anything conclusive about it.

Monday 27 May 2003

0x05: Rapid Application Development: After some 3 months of Delphi 6 my feelings towards those who use anything else are distinctly those of sympathy. This is the MOTHER! For anything from Desktop Applications, Database Applications, Web Servers, Windows Services there is not the slightest hesitation of what to use! Even for simple things like putting images into menus is taken care of off the bat! How many can say that then? Neat things like an editable data bound grid, inline assembler, XML support -- I could extol the virtues of this thing for years but I'd better stop gushing while I still have my self respect.

A lad by the name of Tristan went to great lengths to remind me that Visual Basic was the father of Rapid Application Development. For some 4 years I have been of a similar opinion until my opinion was overturned forever ;-). One thing I do know is that it is a damn sight easier to use than Visual C++! But then again it depends what you're doing, doesn't it?

And then there is the ubiquitous Sybase PowerBuilder that my lads Zul and Dennis from Sybase East Africa have been trying for some months to convince me to switch to. Besides what I have heard about its good integration with Oracle I know little about it and the little I know I don't like. Took me almost ten minutes to figure out where to write the damn code! And inheritance using a menu? What the hey? A MENU? Well, I was supposed to go and collect PowerBuilder 8 some time back and have yet to get around it. But judging from my past Sybase experience.. but it remains to be seen.

Finally got the stuff from my lads but immediately afterwards my IIS ceased to function. My IIS has ben running for about a year now perfectly and I am at a loss what broke its functionality. It ran fine for pure HTML but as soon as it encountered an ASP page it threw up its hands and crashed spectacularly. A peek at the event log showed the error to be an unhandled exception. Since exactly half my consultancy revolves around web technology a non functioning IIS on my development server cannot be tolerated.
Uninstalling it and reinstalling did not help. As a matter of fact the exact same error remained, Moreover it nuked .NET completely. Which forced what few have the will power to stomach..FORMAT C:
Indeed over several cups of coffee I sat down after a presentation, backed up all my stuff and issued the dreaded command. Then the torturous process of installing 2K Server, IIS, Media Server, Service Pack 2, IIS, Office XP, Visual Studio.NET, Illustrator, Photoshop, Delhi, JBuilder, etc etc etc that had me up from 4 in the afternoon to 11 in the night!
Also managed to get my hands on the new Macromedia tools. More on this as soon as I have tinkered around with them.

0x02: WEB SCRIPTING: If you have ever been keen on Perl, Python, Tcl or PHP but have been unwilling to format your machine and install Linux or UNIX then my friend the Gods have smiled at you! Surf on to ActiveState and get yourself ActivePerl, ActivePython and ActiveTcl. These are the binaries that hook into your OS and your IIS (Internet Information Server)so you can enjoy the comfort of Windows and the power of those. For PHP get yourself to php.net and get hold of the CGI binary, which is less than 1 MB, complete with a hand holding installer. (And by the way there was a bug with version 4.1 so I suggest if you already have it you get yourself there and get the latest version)There is an ISAPI binary but I have yet to find use for it!

My money however would ride with PHP. It has a lot of power and flexibility, and its array handling and formatting facilities have to be seen to be believed. Perl is just as powerful if not more but that business of outputting everything from <HTML> has simply not won me over, and nor is it likely to. This is precisely the same reason I have ignored Java Servlets and have skipped directly to Java Server Pages.

If I am writing an Intranet that will run on Windows my language of choice is ASP paired with JavaScript. VBScript I treat with the contempt a mediocre language deserves. I only stoop to using it when I need to format data. There JavaScript spins over and dies but otherwise JavaScript! The beauty is that with the same language I can write both server side and client side code!

For Linux PHP. Ease of mind, ease of use and sheer power. Hook it up to Apache and you are on your way. By the way there seems to be Apache For Win32 but IIS is quite enough for me, and just as free. But for the curious -- go and check it out.

0x04: XML: This beast called XML has been with us for quite a while and the reason that I for one have resisted the urge to add it to my repertoire is because in true IT Industry fashion whenever there is an open protocol every Tom Hilda and Njeri runs off to do their own thing resulting in a fascinating mess. The business of XML, XHTML, XDHTML, XSL, XMLSS, X-convict, X-calibur and even X-Files has become ridiculous. However I have stumbled across some XML component of SQL Server that after proper configuration allows you to send queries through URLs to the web server which pipes it to the SQL server that fetches and pipes the data down to the user as a properly formatted XML document. You can then use XML style sheets to format and display the data. This is good stuff, and now I have been induced to get my hands dirty because the sheer power of such a feature can free you from things like ADO (ActiveX Data Objects). The fact that those nice men and women of Sun have decided to dive into the deep end with extensive XML support is nothing short of an indication that XML is here to stay, provided everyone goes on ahead to style the hell up and stick to standards!

0x04: Linux: I have long been a Linux fan and the release of the new Mandrake 8.2 is nothing but good news to sore ears. I have dabbled with Red Hat and Corel but my confidence remains with Mandrake. Why? They have designed their distribution around KDE which I believe is superior to Gnome. Red Hat merely bolted it on and users of Red Hat 7.0 will be best placed to express themselves the folly of adding things as an afterthought. What's so good about Linux, you ask? Besides the fact that it usually has a very handsome price tag of 0/- if you have a net connection and a CD-Writer it is also extremely powerful and has all sorts of tools and software of impressive power hidden behind those 8 CDs. (You only need the first for the core Operating System). It has stuff like mail servers, proxy servers, database servers, CD burners, chat applications and basically everything that you could possibly want that would cost you zillions if you went the windows route. The fact that you also get the entire source code and thus can modify it to your discretion is another plus, though it takes some brave soul to tinker with those odd million lines of code!

0x06: Visual Studio.NET: Finally got my hands on Visual Studio.NET. Thanks to the brother like relationship we have with Microsoft at work. For those of us who have never had the pleasure of setting eyes on this beast, it comes on Five CDs or so. I have yet to muster the courage to subject my poor notebook Gathoni to this monstrosity. First of all I need to establish is if all my other code will run under this new collection of tools.
However it is installed at some of the office machines and I took the liberty of giving the various apps (Visual Basic, Visual C++ and C#) a test run. For one thing you seem to need Administrator or some other high level rights to debug, let alone compile, an app! This I greet with mixed feelings as it prevents some goon from compiling malicious code he downloaded off the NET, but then again it makes life unnecessarily complex. I have not even began to think about ASP.NET
And I can see that Microsoft have determined to remove the Basic out of Visual Basic! Still, it was about time they got a proper object oriented delegate mechanism in place. I would like to point out that Delphi has had such a mechanism from version 3, if I am not mistaken! Think of it as foresight:-)
And to my fellow Delphi-Heads, the next Delphi, version will bolt on .NET support so there will be nothing you cannot take advantage of in terms of Web and other Services.
And to friend Tristan, Borland also has a DataSet abstraction of user data, that maps to everything from a mere text file to Oracle, Sybase, DB2 and SQL Server. Has had one for 3 versions. Still, my principal interests will now lie towards C++ and C# because I have plans to move on to coding for PDAs and mobile devices, unless VB has been ported to create such apps.

Monday 17 June 2003

0x07: More Visual Studio.NET After some 2 weeks of .NET I can say that it is indeed is a vast improvement from its predecessor. After tinkering with VB for a few days I find little to induce me to shift from Delphi back to VB, principally because most of the features of the new VB are shamelessly 'borrowed' from Delphi, such as the event model, the menu builder, the Visual Component Model and about a gazillion other things. Personally to take full advantage of .NET I shall treat VB with a fine disregard and instead use its more elegant and beautiful sister, C#.
C# on the other hand is an altogether much more splendid beast. I am considerably impressed at its Java like features and power and the fact that unlike Java it supports pointers and native C code is a bonus yet again. Still further neat features like literal strings, full support for older COM objects and catering for switch using a string as opposed to characters and numbers is a plus all round. The enumerated type handling is bulletproof too and I am much taken by it.
And as for those poor fools who refused to switch to JavaScript from VBScript as I have always been preaching, my sympathies are entirely with you. When it comes to ASP VBScript has been left by the wayside! The third option when you wish to script is the newest incarnation of JavaScript, JScript.NET
Which brings me to Web Scripting. I guess now scripting is not the term as now to use ASP you must either learn VB proper or C#. Personally I am sinking my resources and time into C#. ASP is now compiled rather than being interpreted. However there is a ubiquitous process called aspnet_wp that starts as soon as you request an ASP page that merrily takes 18MB of the available RAM. But grown up features such as data binding are finally beautifully implemented and the built in Server controls are simply incredible, ranging from a calendar to data bound text controls such as combo boxes, list boxes and text boxes. The whole palette has to be seen to be believed!
The final cream to the pie is the Web Service. This is exactly what is sounds like, and unlike previous attempts that were very vendor specific, Web Services use XML as the mechanism of transfer which basically means begone firewall headaches!
More on all as soon as I have dug around some more but for the time being -- not bad, not bad at all!