Bold for Delphi Is Open Source | Hacker News Reader

Bold for Delphi Is Open Source

blogs.embarcadero.com

61 pointsomnibrain27 comments

Delphi was my favorite IDE in the early 2000's. I wanted to give it a whirl with its community edition to compile my old personal projects. I received a call days after from Embarcadero asking probing questions about what I'm using it for. It was extremely uncomfortable. I uninstalled Delphi and don't want to do anything with it again. It's just sad.

There is an open source Delphi alternative called Lazarus, by the way: https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

Yes that was a sad story. Delphi CE is meant for people like you. That use Delphi as a hobby.

So I get excited about seeing an old friend. Then when I read the article, they are opensourcing a version which only works with Delphi versions prior to 2009.

Dude, this is 2020.

Embarcadero is now owned by these guys: https://www.ideracorp.com

Their primary modus operandi seems to be: buy tech that's still bringing in money, fire everyone except a small core of people to keep the product barely alive with minor updates, sell expensive long-term licenses to enterprises.

It's no surprise that "the latest official version of Bold is is for Delphi 2006" [1] and that the goal of the opensource version is "is to encourage customers active on the library to share their more recent versions" [2]

[1] https://delphi.fandom.com/wiki/Bold_for_Delphi#The_legal_rig...

[2] https://blogs.embarcadero.com/bold-for-delphi-is-open-source...

> buy tech that's still bringing in money, fire everyone except a small core of people to keep the product barely alive with minor updates, sell expensive long-term licenses to enterprises.

That's pretty much what they did with Sencha/ExtJS, too. Not that it wasn't in dire straits even before the acquisition, though.

And Travis CI. On the day they announced acquisition they let go something like 80% of the staff.

As the post mentions, several Delphi customers had updated Bold to work with newer versions of Delphi but weren’t about to share their changes since Bold hadn’t been released under an open source license.

It looks like enabling that sharing is one of the reasons for open sourcing Bold. So it might be keeping an eye on the GitHub repository.

Exactly! this is hopefully the start of a great community effort at making an up to date, great platform.

(I know the guys behind one of the major users, and they should have a lot of goodies to share, hopefully).

They closed the news server (and its web gateway) a few years ago. I guess they did it to avoid the backlash of news like this. Wow.

Edit: is there any other forum out there? I remember some google group or something but it was mostly dead too.

Wait, why would you close something in order to avoid backlash about opening it?

Delphi and family have changed hands several times since the golden Delphi 7 age. A lot of the decisions along the way were very controversial. Think of a product with a massive community turning into niche. Price up while cutting costs.

It was clear that they intended to squeeze the few remaining customers. The forums, even moderated by the company, reflected the bad morale. So they closed the forums. They were in a nntp server with a web gateway.

The last insult, that made me disconnect, was removing database access from the "Professional" license and moving it to the "Enterprise Architect", not sure how it ended, I couldn't keep watching.

This Bold news seem too little too late.

This is inaccurate.

The pro license compiles to Android, IOS, Windows, and OSX. You can connect to SQLite and IBlite. Additionally, you can connect to MySQL or other DBs on localhost for example. Lastly, you can connect to remote databases with third party solutions (though against the spirit of the license).

The enterprise license allows connecting to over 20 different remote databases.

The architect license (the most expensive) has additional features not related to connecting to remote databases.

How much is Pro nowadays? And it can't connect to a proper RDBMS.

Come on.

But don't worry, the post is surely out of the front page now, so nobody cares what I say.

~$51/month for 36 months.

I remember trying out MDA software like Bold for Delphi in the early 2000s. UML was big at my university at that years and MDA software like Bold felt like the future. I imagined sometime around 2005-2007 that everybody will draw UMLs and use MDAs in the future and that is the way of programming.

Reality hit me very hard when my profession was going clearly towards web development (frontend and backend) and OOP and UML became more like a side effect. Still undecided if it is useful in a big context especially when I see what happened in the Java world (which made me hate OOP).

I think the Java world over-used object orientation in the wrong way: For pretty much everything except creating a good data model. That's why we got InterfaceSelectorAdapterFactory and such. That is, it focussed a lot of effort at abstracting a lot of technical details, instead of focusing hard on the data model, and keeping everything else as simple as possible.

Bold was in my view all about a more sane way of using object orientation: To build a good data model. This still holds up as a good way, as we are now (thankfully) moving towards a more data-centric orientation for building enterprise systems.

It is still useful in business applications, big and small. Now let's only upgrade it to compile with Delphi versions later than D2007. Aim is to support the latest Delphi (10.4)

//RIL

Bold for Delphi serve us well. Might not be the best for small utilities. But if your project is complex with many business rules Bold show it's strength. It gives you the ability to focus on the problem and not on technical details. The current state of the repo is not ready as it not support latest Delphi yet. But it will be fixed. It would be also nice with a visual model editor.

I almost have a heart attack thinking delphi was going open source (so bold!)

That was about time!

Bold Architecture is an industrial strength (battle tested) MDA/ORM framework. The best of the best. I spent years building business software with Bold.

//RIL

Yep, for anyone wanting to pick RIL's brain about how to design Bold-based systems for higher performance, we do have a blog post which was quite highly acclaimed when it was first published on howtodothings.com many years ago:

https://rillabs.com/posts/dynamic-navigation-for-higher-perf...

Might give the uninitiated a taste for what Bold was/is all about.

Does it make sense to learn Delphi in 2020?

If you want to use database prepare $3000 and another $1000 for upgrades per year. Per seat.

If you look at the job market there is about 1000:1 ratio for Java:delphi jobs in my area. So no it's not worth it. I worked 15 years in Delphi. Used it as hobby since Delphi 4. I liked it but it's time to move on. I still use 2 apps daily (git gui client and text editor) on Linux using lazarus which is free.

Depends last offer to work (earlier this year) as Delphi developer was €1200/day excl. VAT which is an amazing day rate

So, you don't have a relevant project? Well, other people have.

I myself currently use C# since years and, yes, C# is fine, but I would have used Delphi more if Bold hadn't been locked in a safe for so long.

When .NET Native came into the picture, after the initial attempt with MDIL in Windows 8.x, I thought finally we have what .NET 1.0 should have been all above, given its Delphi background.

But no, now its future looks uncertain and it remains to be seen how .NET 6 will provide a proper AOT story, if any.

Sometimes I really miss not being able to use Delphi.

If you want to use the best ORM framework for native Win32, and open source, then yes. There's a .NET version out there as well (Eco / MDriven) but it's not open source.

The "geneology" of this framework is: Bold -> Eco -> MDriven.

//RIL

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