Delphi For PHP Noobs Are We All

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