Delphi for PHP released

**jasonf** · 29-03-2007, 03:24 PM

I think I'm missing something, why would anyone release a PHP Editor which isn't as complete as some of the cheap/free ones? Unless it does other things...

I used PHP Designer for some work I was doing at home a few months ago, I found it to be a great piece of software. I think sometimes, in an effort to make it easier to throw up forms, the IDE's encourage bad practice. PHP Designer didn't.

http://www.mpsoftware.dk/products.php

Although, to be honest, I use Visual Studio.net at work for the Web stuff I do from time to time... and it is nice

ops: although it does promote far too many microsoftisms (2003 version) but it does have good support for stylesheets when designing the pages. But it's ASP.net only

**Legolas** · 29-03-2007, 03:24 PM

I'm almost sure that something similar could be done with lazarus. IIRC, some months ago I read on lazarus forum a thread about that

**WILL** · 29-03-2007, 03:40 PM

Well once the Object Pascal disappointment wears off, it's really quite an amazing idea...

Web scripting and testing (even with Dreamweaver) is in a terrible state, even after over 10 years of technical evolution. Not so much with regards to the source code editing it's self, but the debugging and testing process.

Lets face it... there isn't really a good debugger for PHP apps out there. (or at least it is unknown to me.) Which makes finding and doing the debugging yourself a royal pain.

I don't know the exact make-up of Delphi for PHP, but if they plan on adding a debugger, I'd seriously consider owning a copy myself. Well I guess I'll have to give this demo a try and see for myself.

**Robert Kosek** · 29-03-2007, 04:15 PM

The only PHP Debugger in existence is PHP itself. You cannot execute PHP without PHP installed, which would require Apache. So the debugger just does what all the others does: run a script in debug mode. Or perhaps with a special command line variable that tells PHP to just return debugging information.

Web scripting and testing (even with Dreamweaver) is in a terrible state, even after over 10 years of technical evolution. Not so much with regards to the source code editing it's self, but the debugging and testing process.

False. FireBug, a free plugin for FireFox, lets me debug JavaScript and XHTML/CSS in realtime. In fact, I write my PHP code to echo hidden debugging blocks of code that only appear in certain instances, like when either a debug or admin account is logged in. At which point, I have both sides covered by PHP, my own debugging stuff, and FireBug. Terrible state? I wrote a whole configuration package for a software module in 1 month! I wasn't even sure I could do it from the start, but I did.

So... $300 for nothing new, and I'm serious when I say it's nothing new, is not a good thing. It's a bad thing. I honestly don't like ASP, but VS is fairly good. Only I notice silly bugs and slowdowns that I know are related to ASP (like logon delays, and checking sessions).

Trust me, I'm fighting with this stuff right now. We're working with an "embedded" server now, and our interface is terribly coded in C. I can't fix that, but I can certainly tell my employer that their current track is self-destructive. And when it is Ansi-C, not even C++, that's doing what we're doing (NDA, sorry) it is a mess and is WORSE to debug than PHP.

**JernejL** · 29-03-2007, 04:38 PM

Originally Posted by WILL

I don't know the exact make-up of Delphi for PHP, but if they plan on adding a debugger, I'd seriously consider owning a copy myself. Well I guess I'll have to give this demo a try and see for myself.

it does have a debugger..

**savage** · 15-04-2007, 10:55 PM

Btw, they seem to have extended the trail period from 1 day to 14 days now.

**technomage** · 23-05-2007, 08:07 PM

Dom and I saw the full version of Delphi for PHP in action today. With Code Insight, Completion and Integrated Debugging (breakpoints , watches etc) all there and a very impressive demo on the use of the vcl4php.

I wouldn't right this product off, remember many years ago someone released a product with would allow you to develop compiled windows applications rapidly, allot of people back then were saying "why would I do that, I can't trust the code it's using, I can use the Window API directly and do it myself!", look what happened.

The vcl4php is open source, so if you want it to be XHTML 1.1 compliant or what ever get involved. open sourcing the vcl4php is a great move.

CodeGear have done a good thing here, and with the Rudy on the Rail IDE following later this year, it's only going to get better.

**WILL** · 23-05-2007, 08:32 PM

I'm actually quite happy about this coming out. It's one of the really smart non-Pascal things that CodeGear has done since they took over.

I've been working with PHP for quite some time now and I have to tell ya. The way it's done now gives me terrible flashbacks to my old TP7 days.

In fact TP7 was much farther along than this in some respects. :lol: It had a proper debugger.

Delphi for PHP will likely be a piece of software that I'll be adding to my library. I just hope that a Linux version will be soon to follow in the coming years as I really don't plan on sticking with Windows for very long.

**savage** · 23-05-2007, 10:38 PM

I also enjoyed the Delphi for PHP demo, though what they showed was fairly simplistic, I still thought it has great potential! Definitely a product to watch and one I am considering getting for my PHP development.

**jdarling** · 24-05-2007, 02:08 PM

Downloaded it and tried it out. Not impressed. Loading EC's default engine crashes Delphi for PHP in about 1/3 of a second

. Created a new project, dropped a few components on and linked it up to the database. Everything ran fine. Attempted to hook the generated PHP to my style sheets, nothing but a pain. Gave up.

I do hope that this goes someplace though, even though I don't think I'll ever go back to Delphi, I would consider Delphi for PHP for web development when it gets a bit more robust and stable.