Delphi 4 PHP Watch

Tonight after work I fired up the old Delphi 4 PHP IDE and saw that the Qadram companion site is now up...check it out

PHP Web Application Development Framework

This is particularly awesome since it has all the working samples, ONLINE, and LIVE.  Plus you can download the source code if need be.  They also are mirroring the VCL documentation I have referred to previously, and also have a WIki set up where they have how to guides for setting up apps with the components...

Here are a few things from the WIki Page:  (built using Delphi for PHP btw)

At this late hour I feel like a kid the night before Christmas...too tired to stay up but can't yet go to sleep.  I think this is going to make a HUGE difference with my understanding and use of the project...at least I hope.  I will dive into it tomorrow and hopefully it will help me as much as I think it is going to.  Looks very promising.

One thing caught me a little off guard regarding updates and support.  I was looking through the IDE this evening and found the following in the read me section:

To download any available updates to the Delphi for PHP development environment, visit http://www.codegear.com/downloads. Get the latest VCL for PHP updates from the open source project site at http://sourceforge.net/projects/vcl4php/.

Now I understand that the VCL is being handled in the Open Source community.  However in my mind I think that since Delphi is distributing them with the launch of this product that I should be able to get component updates from them? 

I understand that these are open source components that can be modified by the community, but it seems to me that there should be some way that Codegear would be able to vet new versions of components.  I guess where I am going with all of this is with regard to security concerns. 

I realize the beauty of open source is that users can act quickly to resolve issues and innovate.  However along with that power comes a certain danger that requires knowledge to discern...what to download and what is ok to use.  I guess for the time being I would rather have my components come from the company I paid for the IDE.

Thoughts?

Check it out.  There is a new site with forums...etc about Delphi 4 PHP.  It looks like there is already some activity.  I'll be checking this one out tomorrow.

Delphi 4 PHP site with Forums

Here is a post I found interesting. He talks about some of the same
misgivings I had about the level of documentation. It seems like he was
able to get something up and running as a test application. However he ran
into some problems when trying to run it on a web server. His final
thought is that the product seems to have been released too soon. I tend
to agree, but think once the users get mobilized behind this and Codegear
makes some fixes and lays out better documentation we will be in better
shape. Read on and let me know what you think.

Delphi for PHP first impressions
By Tim
There will be plenty more to say about Delphi for PHP. For the moment I'm
reserving judgment. I will say that the release looks rushed, which is a
shame. I'll fix the Input Filter thing as soon as I know how. Technorati
tags: delphi for ...
Tim Anderson's ITWriting -
http://www.itwriting.com/blog

I stumbled on the VCL Reference at Sourceforge tonight.  Hopefully this should help with documentation issues.  I come from the world of products like Dreamweaver and Visual Basic.  Those are fairly mature products with a lot of books and documentation to be found.  I guess PHP being open source leave much of the documentation aside from books, up to the community which is cool.  It was a little bit of a culture shock for me not to find too much in the way of documentation with the product but I am learning that the documentation for this follows the PHP model.

So without further ado.... VCL Documentation at Sourceforge

I am curious to hear what you think of the new IDE released this week?  Has anyone used it to make anything?  Has anyone found a decent source of information for the different components in the VCL?

Feel free to comment.

After hearing about the new PHP product that was just recently released by Delphi I was quite enthused to see what they had come up with.  I am a somewhat newcomer at this stage to web programming.  I have several books on PHP, MySQL and other web related technologies so I am familiar with certain ways of doing things...hand coding a form and adding in all the fields, and actions....to make stuff work.  I have primarily dabbled in this arena as a hobbyist to this point.  This is an entirely new paradigm for doing this stuff.

I see the cool potential everyday of harnessing these technologies every day in different websites I find...cool social networking sites, or blogging sites...anything that uses a backend database.  The thing is that the newer hotter sites (web 2.0) have all that Ajax stuff going on...which I guess isn't an obstacle if you have been programming for a while.  In my case I am more of an beginner...and the obstacle to me is weaving together html, css, javascript, MySQL, and whatever else thrown on top of that to make a cool, usable web app.  In comes Delphi For PHP....and hopefully you...the readers of this blog.  Perhaps we could start a discussion of different topics related to Delphi for PHP.

Back to my story....Naturally I was pretty excited when I saw the things this product was supposed to be able to do.  It would seemingly allow me to drag some VCL components (controls) on to a form (design surface), attach them to a datasource (you already have a database set up right?), throw in a little code and voila......a rudmientary database enable web app!

Well it is sort of like that, but a little more complex.

In any case I will probably be going back to Delphi (Codegear) to check out their support options.  I have found a few bugs so far, and the documentation is a little sparse.  I have not had a chance to fully dig into the sample files of which there are many.   

The thing that is cool about this is that we are all in the same boat at this stage....it's all new!  So while programming in an IDE for PHP is not new, using the controls in this context is new for me and probably many people...unless you have been using ASP.  Plus the way the IDE writes a lot of 'under the hood' code for you that will handle paginating results from a database query, updating records, deleting records....it makes web application development. 

Hopefully in coming months a web community will begin to flourish for this product, new books will proliferate and a new golden age of web app programming will be ushered in.

Lets get something started