[Lazarus] Lazarus make me create better apps

[Myles Wakeham]

Razvan wrote:

 >On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 2:41 PM, Marco van de Voort 
<marcov at stack.nl>wrote:
 > >
 > > If you can deal with Delphi, and can be substituted by PHP 
programmers, you
 > > are doing something wrong.
 >
 >What is wrong about web programming in Delphi/FPC ?
 >Of course it can be substituted, PHP is older and many people know it
 >already, but there's too few Delphi/FPC developers out there, at least
 >that's what my boss always tells me, if it wasn't so we wouldn't have 
 >to get
 >people with C-ish background into our team.
 >Of course PHP can't replace Delphi but on the web side of things. >that's
 >another story.

Agreed.  PHP is a 'staple' in web development, and is benefited by a 
large number of mature frameworks supporting multiple design patterns, 
IDEs in large deployments (ie. Eclipse, Netbeans, etc.) and a huge 
community.  I certainly wouldn't use it for desktop software 
development, but speaking as an ISV we are not getting phone calls from 
prospective clients wanting desktop software developed these days - they 
all seem to want a web hosted application solution.

Personally I'd far prefer to be developing in Delphi/FPC for these 
applications but the time it would take me to compensate for the rich 
number of frameworks, etc. in the PHP world would make the development 
timeframe for large scale business app development that we do, cost 
prohibitive for the client.

However with that said, we are about to embark of developing much of our 
shipped application software in FPC/Lazarus simply because there is no 
way to protect our source code when provided to a client for them to 
host on their own servers.  This is a big weakness of PHP in general - 
sure there are obfuscation solutions out there, but I'm yet to find 
anything that I would be 100% happy with that my source is protected 
entirely.  Plus the performance degredation for PHP apps (if PHP wasn't 
slow enough in its default installation) affects my client's productivity.

I think there is a really good place for BOTH FPC/Lazarus/Delphi web 
apps AND PHP apps.  I don't see them as mutually exclusive here.  Many 
of our clients want to tweak the web pages that we serve and by using 
tools like Smarty, etc. in PHP I can give them access to the app and let 
them loose on their own sites without too much fear of disaster.  Of 
course, never say never....

Myles

-- 
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Myles Wakeham
Director of Engineering
Tech Solutions USA, Inc.
www.techsolusa.com
Phone +1-480-451-7440