Re: Oracle Forms vs. Delphi

In article <ddnguyenDByxL5.9nu_at_netcom.com>,

   ddnguyen_at_netcom.com (Duc Nguyen) wrote:
>
>Hi all,
>We'll be choosing either Oracle Forms4.5 or Borland's Delphi as our
>development tool next week. I've used Powerbuilder, SQLWindows,
>Visual Basic, and Delphi & and think Delphi is the best of the bunch.
>However, my boss wants me to look at Forms4.5 because Oracle is
>our DBMS. If you've used both Forms4.5 and Delphi, what would you
>choose ? I haven't used Forms4.5, BTW. What are the strengths and
>weaknesses of Forms4.5 ? Anyone used Delphi against Oracle ? Any
>comments ? Thanks.

First of all, Delphi is an all purpose programming environment where FORMS 4.5  is data centric. Delphi is a compiler where FORMS is an interpreter. Forms 4.5 has a much shorter learning curve than Delphi has. I think that for simple stuff, sutff that FORMS does well (Transaction control, query, navigatioin from one record to the other, master detail etc...) it's going to be easier and faster to develop stuff; although you can acheive the same thing with Delphi's class, you'll need a serious and real good Delphi program that should be in charge of developing component and class for the rest of the team. Delphi will allow you to build fancy stuff and you'll have more control over performance issue. But where Delphi use Borland SQL link drivers (they work well with Oracle 7.1.3 under open vms) Oracle use internal call to SQL*Net. Forms 4.5 is looks like a real Windows product though. You can use VBX, DDE, OLE and you can call function inside DLL, so you can still use Delphi to build the more fancy or technical part of you application. If you intend to distribute you're system on machine with less than 8 MB of RAM you shoudn't even considering FORMS has an alternative. Also the way FORMS consume USER and GDI ressource is not under your control. Delphi seems to have no GPF where FORMS 4.5 still has some. But to go with Delphi you should have a really good team of dedicated programmers who wants to learn and dig inside the product, where with FORMS you don't kneed has much an experience teams. Hope it helps! Received on Fri Jul 21 1995 - 00:00:00 CEST