Re: Delphi 2.0 vs. Powerbuilder 5.0

Edward_Hillman_at_mail.amsinc.com (Ed Hillmann) wrote:

>PB and Delphi are very close, and using it would not have been bad. But,
>Delphi is faster, much more flexible (making your own components, etc), and
>generally, for our purposes, had more to offer us than PowerBuilder did.

To address your two major points, components and performance:

Performance

Most client/server database applications spend most of their time waiting for a response from the server. They generally do not have huge routines that run for several minutes, or even seconds. In order to see significant performance differences in Delphi vs PB 5.0 machine code I had to iterate my tests 10,000 times. At that point differences become insignificant.

If, on the other hand, you're building more general purpose applications (i.e. non-database or minimal database interaction) such as a PIM or some other utility (I believe the current version of WinCode is written in Delphi) then the performance issue becomes more important, no doubt about it.

Components

This gets brought up fairly frequently and I honestly don't see a big difference in the end result of what Delphi does vs the ability to create several different types of user objects in PowerBuilder. Sure, PB's implementation is different, but from what I've seen the end result is functionally the same.

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Craig Wagner		| E-mail:  wagnerc_at_teleport.com
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