The Lair of the Pythia

This week’s topic for discussion around Delphi-related blogs will undoubtedly be the newly released roadmap. Most of this will doubtless center around technical features and will be of the “I want my new toys now (and other people can wait for theirs)” type, which is entirely understandable because everyone out there trying to make money out of software wants the best tools for their projects now. For me, the bleeding edge is not a great issue. The only development I’m really interested in is 64-bit, and I’m happy to wait on that while the hardware and O/S implementations sort themselves out.

What I am happy about, however, is the existence of a roadmap. A lot of people have tended to scoff and CodeGear’s worries about Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, and have even suggested that this is a smokescreen for not wanting to say anything. Those of us who have worked in regulatory economics know better. These days it is a really bad idea for a software company to go around making airy promises about new versions of their products unless they are pretty sure that they can deliver. So the fact that CodeGear has issued a roadmap suggests that they, their auditors, their lawyers and whatever consultants they might be using are all happy that it is safe to say the things they said. And that, in turn, makes Delphi’s future look a whole lot more safe and secure. (And if you have clients who are convinced that CodeGear will be out of business soon that’s a very good thing.)

One other thing worth noting is that is appears from what the roadmap says that Studio 2007 will have an upgrade path from Delphi 2007, and not be a separate product. It doesn’t exactly say that, and the small print warns about not using the roadmap as a basis for licensing decisions, but it does seem to imply it, which is encouraging.

Yeah, I know, I’ve been quiet for a long time. I’ve been working, earning money, OK?

But I have finally found time to start having a play with Delphi for PHP. It isn’t much of a start, but it is a start.

I’ve been doing a bit of Wordpress work – essentially adding a whole lot of extra database tables to a Wordpress blog. Now Wordpress is not a Delphi for PHP app, so you can’t just dive in there and use the VCL. However, I have been using the IDE, because if I’m writing PHP the source code highlighting stops me making a whole lot of stupid mistakes that I always used to make in Dreamweaver. For this I am very grateful.

And there might be more. Wordpress plug-ins should not, I think, be written using the VCL. But if you have a bunch of extra tables that are largely independent of the Wordpress data… Now the choice is between writing moderately complex data entry screens that are plugins for the Wordpress admin system, or writing a separate program using the VCL. Wordpress is, after all, just a mySQL database, so as long as you don’t touch the core Wordpress tables it should be OK, right?

Well, doubtless it won’t be that easy. It never is. But at least I have a potential trial project.