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Delphi Dusts Visual BASIC
A HIT
Powerful and friendly, Borland's new 4GL application development system
earns a must-have rating.
By Nancy Nicolaisen, Windows Sources, June, 1995
Borland is at last shipping its Delphi object oriented visual programming
tool, and the package's final release easily meets the considerable promise
of its earlier beta versions. (See "Sharpening the Focus on Visual
Programming," December 1994, and Paul Bonner's On Customization column,
February 1995.) Delphi's final version includes a few interface tweaks and
final compiler tuning. Borland set pricing at $495 for the desktop version
and $ 1,999 for the Client/server version.
Delphi provides as much power as any true object-oriented language and is
as friendly to nonprogrammers as Visual Basic. The program supports
inheritance, encapsulation, and polymorphism, and it generates compiled
executables.
Delphi uses a forms-based interface for designing applications and lets you
accomplish a lot without doing any coding at all. Prebuilt reusable objects
include both standard dialog and visual interface elements, plus numerous
data-aware controls for browsing and querying databases.
Delphi kicks the chair out from under its competition in its ablity to
generate high performance compiled executables--not the slower interpreted
code most Visual Basic environments generate.
Database programmers will appreciate Delphl's full SQL-92 support and the
way its prebuilt controls shield them from unnecessary coding. And Delphi's
debugger rates every bit as powerful as that of Borland C++.
Delphi's strong set of network simulation tools should endear it to
developers. Borland integrates within Delphi a local server version of
Interbase that runs as a high-performance local server under Windows. Using
this simulator, we designed and coded client/server applications without
having to connect to a remote server.
Delphi is a must-have visual development tool. If you're building
applications for Windows 3.x and/or Win 95, put it in your tookit.
