The Lair of the Pythia

The presentations from CodeRage have now been made available from the CodeGear web site. There’s a lot of good stuff there. However, these are still the raw presentations, so some of them could be a bit poor quality. Anders Ohlsson says they will be updating the presentations as they get time to clean them up.

As with most other people, I thought it went rather well. Here are some thoughts.
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As with everything else at CodeRage, things in the chat room are looking up. The people who appeared to only be there to lark around and annoy as many of the other attendees as possible appear to have given up. There’s some serious discussion, but also some silliness. So, in advance of the rest of the conference, here’s where you can post requests for:

1. Music you’d like played in the breaks (or music you play while coding); and

2. Beer (or wine or whatever) you’d like served at the virtual reception tomorrow.

While we were listening to the presentation on the D2007 help system (which looks to be an order of magnitude improvement over the old stuff – well done guys!) a conversation developed about looking for Delphi advice on the web. It is difficult to find reliable advice, and I’ve got very frustrated at times. I’m not very fond of code examples that are not explained and don’t work. I’m also painfully aware that while I’ve been writing Pascal code since before Fred Flintstone was born I’m by no means up to date on the latest tricks. However, there are good people out there. I’m trying to make sure that I only link to sites that reputable. And if I haven’t linked to you yet, that may just mean I haven’t got round to it – bug me.

In the meantime, if you are a newbie, I direct your attention to the list of Learning Delphi links in the first of the sidebars.

As time goes on both CodeGear and the attendees are getting the hang of this virtual conference thing. The tech is better each day, and if I’m anything to go by we are getting the hang of the various mix of tools it is necessary to use to get the best out of it. Having two computers helps, but one of mine is tuned in to live commentary from the cricket World Cup.

There weren’t many sessions directly relevant to me today, but I made a point of tuning in for Ray Konopka again. There doesn’t appear to be a lot to choose between CodeSite and SmartInspect. They both do pretty much the same thing, and it is a very useful thing. I guess both products have their good points and bad points, but CodeSite does benefit from those neat Raize interfaces, and it has Ray selling it. I’m trying not to be superficial, so if anyone out there has thoughts on which is the best please let me know.

The session on Extreme Programming was interesting too. I’m not sold, but I am a big believer in testing so I’m going to follow up some of the reading that Rob Park suggested.

Ray Konopka’s presentation yesterday was fascinating from a technical point of view. Today’s was a masterful demonstration of how to sell a product. Yesterday I was happy with the user interface tools I have. Now I want a copy of Raize Components. The CodeRage offer page for Raise is here. Go buy.

The tech side seems to be running much better today. There are occasional hiccups, and I had quite a bit of audio break-up in the PHP session, but nothing like as bad as yesterday. This all augurs well for the rest of the week.

I missed the first part of Marco’s talk, but I got there in time to hear him announce that he’s writing a new book based on the additions to Delphi from D2005 onwards. I’m in the queue to buy a copy.

And then the aforementioned PHP session. The more I hear about this product the more I like it. There are people out there doing good work with PHP, but if you’ve been used to developing desktop applications in Delphi the whole web development thing seems unbelievably hard. That’s all about to change. VCL for PHP is going to bring the whole OOP paradigm to building web pages and should make it much easier to write impressive PHP web applications.

Also I’ve heard back from Pair and it turns out that enabling PHP 5 on their servers is a matter of one line in your .htaccess file, so I’m good to go there. Here’s hoping that the product is able to ship soon.

In his introductory presentation Nick Hodges got back onto his favorite theme about the Turbos being somehow a different animal from the Studio products. I think the message is pretty clear now that the Turbos are intended to be somehow cut down versions of the Studio. Even if they have very similar functionality now, they may not do so in the future. Equally I think that CodeGear now understands that if it wants Turbo users as customers then it has to treat them with respect and as part of the developer family. Not everyone who does programming works in a big software house, or indeed wants to.

Anyway, we now believe that there will be an upgrade path from the Turbos to the Studio products for the benefit of those people for whom the limitations of the Turbos become burdensome. (As I noted earlier, it may not be possible to buy that upgrade yet, but we’ve been promised it will be.)

But the question that has been nagging away at my mind is this: “What do Turbo customers want?” Or, to put it another way, what is a sensible way in which CodeGear can limit the functionality of the Turbos as compared to the Studio and not irritate people by making it seem that the Turbos are not not worth having?
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I’ve been doing a quick bit of research regarding the PHP 5 issue. It appears that Wordpress will work on a PHP 5 site, and I’ve spotted at least one plugin that requires PHP 5, which is promising. However, I also spotted a warning in the Codex about some PHP 5 tricks that don’t work in Wordpress so there may be issues. I suspect if I do add some Delphi PHP demos here they won’t be part of the main blog.

But to add anything I need PHP support from my ISP. I take Andreano’s point that ISPs ought to get with the times, but Pair are not exactly a small outfit and if they don’t have PHP 5 as a standard offering I’m wondering how many people will. The FAQ on their support site says that PHP 5.1.1. is available “as a CGI for customer experimentation.” I’ve dropped off an email to ask what that means and whether 5 will go on general release soon.

I’d really rather not change ISP. I’ve been very happy with Pair. But then again, they don’t have Ruby on Rails support either.

Well, we got there in the end. It was a bit of a nightmare to begin with, but CodeGear appear to have got all of their bandwidth problems sorted by the end of the day. I found the PHP session very interesting, and Ray Konopka’s session on themed controls was fascinating even though I’m never likely to use any of it.

If you are thinking of dropping in tomorrow, make sure that you check here and here for the latest news on various tricks for getting round access issues. And if you missed some of this morning’s material it is being made available for download here.