Hi, I know I sometimes bitch about some little thing in FPC or Lazarus. Well, it's not all bad. :-) I often tell other people about our company experience with FPC and Lazarus. This time I thought I would forward one such email here. Just to show you guys that we (as users) do appreciate all the efforts you guys put into these projects. Keep up the great work - CodeGear should tremble in their boots!
-------- Original Message -------- Date: Tue, 07 Oct 2008 From: Graeme Geldenhuys <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ******* wrote: > We are still unsure if we ever gonna make the move to fpc/laz, we need > to invest to much time in converting our existing apps, Well, we invested in Borland since D4-D7, plus Kylix 3 Pro (and then Enterprise). We invested heavily in CLX and Borland showed us the finger. It costed us a lot of time and money! We decided long and hard (4 months of research) if Delphi or even Object Pascal was the way to go, or if we should jump ship to C/C++, C#, Java etc... We evaluated a lot of tools and languages. Luckily we stumbled across Free Pascal and then Lazarus. A familiar language and no more worrying if the company is only thinking about it's shareholders and not developers using there tools. Free Pascal and Lazarus developers work on their tools because programming is their passion. That's why we are in this line of business as well. These project are here to stay! Like I've mentioned to a few other people as well. We moved over 4 years ago, and don't have a single regret. We always have the latest compiler for free, the latest IDE for free, get much quicker fixes applied and the support is something CodeGear can only drool about (and for free). The Free Pascal compiler is absolutely great! In many respects I think it's way better than Delphi's compiler. The Lazarus community and Lazarus IDE is also pretty awesome. The IDE is easy to extend and add or amend features that are lacking. Plus, it's light on resources - so it flies on any PC. Oh, and the Lazarus Packages (*.lpk files) are heaven!! They are not nearly as feature-less as Delphi packages. Lazarus Packages are not just used for creating dll's, they are a vital part in how we develop our apps. Segmenting areas or code, has their own settings and handles unit paths for you. Yes the IDE is different to Delphi's IDE, but it was never designed to be a Delphi IDE clone. Only the LCL was designed to be a VCL clone. It's take about a week to get to know the IDE - then Delphi IDE starts feeling strange. ;-) 4 years ago, the LCL was too inconsistent between platforms. If you are only targeting a single platform, you would never have noticed any issues. We were quite picky as well and detected minor things normal users clearly never noticed - but those little things were important to out product. After a while with LCL we decided to go our own route and roll our own GUI toolkit. That was all a long time ago, and I'm sure the LCL has improved all this - their development is quite fast paced. I know the IDE has improved tremendously over the last few years. I would highly recommend any development team to set aside one developer and at least let him or her play with Lazarus and FPC for a week. Get onto the FPC and Lazarus mailing lists as ask questions! Create prototype apps that reflect your real business - no "Hello World" sh*t. Playing with Lazarus and FPC for a hour does not do it justice - *nobody* can review such a tool chain in an hour! Okay, that's my advertising done for the month! :-) I should actually write a case study or white paper on this. ;-) Graeme. -------------------------------[ end ]----------------------------- Regards, - Graeme - _______________________________________________ fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/ _______________________________________________ fpc-devel maillist - fpc-devel@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-devel
