Am 17.01.2011 11:03, schrieb [email protected]:
On Mon, 17 Jan 2011, Sven Barth wrote:
Am 17.01.2011 10:18, schrieb [email protected]:
On Mon, 17 Jan 2011, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
Op 2011-01-17 09:33, Martin Schreiber het geskryf:
Graeme, - please, no offending meant -
None taken.
fpGUI has implemented at the moment probably less than 50% of a
good RAD
development environment like Lazarus, Delphi or MSEide+MSEgui.
RAD is overrated (marketing speak) and only good for prototyping.
I beg to differ. When used properly, RAD is just that: RAD.
But it takes someone who knows what he's doing to properly set it up.
Out of the box, Delphi (or lazarus) needs a lot of work if you want to
use it for large applications. But with the right subclasses,
properties, wizards and component editors, RAD is the best you can do to
create applications quickly. Doubly so if your development team
consists of people of various skill levels.
Out of curiosity: what would Lazarus need according to you to be a
good RAD IDE?
Nothing. It has all it needs.
Maybe more controls in the style of TButtonPanel: specialized controls.
Each project/firm/team has its own design goals. Lazarus (or Delphi) cannot
cater for all these goals. But they do allow you to extend the IDE so you
can keep working in a RAD way and still follow your design goals with a
minimum of effort.
I have an application with 1500 forms. It would be madness to have to set
over and over again the same set of properties and event handlers to
save/restore formlayout, ask to save unsaved data, sort grids and
whatnot. So
- You create a descendent of TForm (or TCustomForm)
- You add all 'common' functionality to this descendant, plus lots of extra
properties to control this functionality.
- You register this form in the IDE under File/New
- You do the same for common controls. Grids, date edits, whatnot. You
register them on the component palette.
- Create a wizard that creates an initial layout for the form, based on the
data you'll be editing in that form. (we use 3-tier data, but you can do
exactly the same for a persistence framework)
After that, you create new forms extremely fast without losing RAD
functionality: a pure point-and-click environment, which is always
faster than coding, and which is understood by people of many skill levels.
Many forms in my applications don't have any form-specific code
associated with them whatsoever: just the class declaration and form
file. Yet they offer a lot of functionality out of the box.
Since it is simply OOP, You could do all of this in code, but code is
slower
to create and is more error-prone. Hence RAD and point-and-click.
Thank you for the extensive explanation.
Regards,
Sven
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