Hacker News Reader

Comment by FeistySkink | Hacker News Reader

I feel like Delphi, along with maybe VB6 and WinForms, have been the pinnacle of easy UI development, and things have gone significantly downhill since then. Especially on the web side, where even a single view sometimes requires having multiple unrelated dependencies (packers, builders, transpilers, etc.), often implicitly-configured to produce output, in head-space. And due to this dependency hell, when porting a project like this to a new platform, or just getting it to run, a slight change in the environment silently breaks the build.

View on HN

Agree, Delphi was extremely nice way to do UI development.. I've made many small GUIs for everyday tasks back when I was using it.

Unfortunately "dependency hell" was very real -- it was super-easy to download ActiveX controls, install on the system, and then depend on them in the apps. Worse, Windows had a single ActiveX database per computer, and an control installed by a completely unrelated app would appear in the Delphi's palette, ready to be placed on a form. After having a few apps that would not work on friends' computers, I've mostly gave up on ActiveX components completely.. luckily third-party Delphi components were better - at least the compiled binaries would work. Source code still required system-wide install though...

If you think that "pip install", or "npm install", or even "apt-get install" on a Linux system is bad, you haven't seen what Delphi world was like. But to be fair, it's not really Delphi's fault - all Windows development was like that, full of bespoke settings that need to be set on each PC. For a complex software, it was normal to spend a few days just setting up the system so you can do initial build.

Another Delphi-specific issue was that by default forms were specified in pixels, and were hard-coded to specific font sizes; and color pickers had hardcoded colors (as opposed to system theme colors) prominently displayed. Unless you were very careful, it was very easy to make an app that could not handle different font or screen theme. And many apps that would benefit greatly from being resizable were non-resizeable instead, just because it was easier.

FWIW ActiveX specifically was really more so that Delphi is able to use the Visual Basic stuff than something native to Delphi. Components made for Delphi specifically are (usually) compiled as part of the final executable without needing ActiveX.

In fact AFAIK ActiveX support in Delphi was implemented by generating a wrapper component that converted the ActiveX control stuff to what Delphi "naturally" speaks.

For forms, even in Delphi 2 you can use the "align" property in several controls to automatically position them inside a container using the top, bottom, left, right and client area. The areas also stack so you can, e.g., position several controls at the top area and you'd get an effect similar to what a VBox container would provide in other toolkits. Though the initial versions of Delphi did not have this available everywhere, it was added to various controls over time.

Later versions also added "anchors" so that you can drag-drop stuff visually to the form but also have them resize automatically based on the parent's size. Lazarus (sort of open source Delphi-like IDE) extended this to allow anchoring stuff related to other control (so, e.g., you could have a button's right side a few pixels from another button's left side and that button's right side be a few pixels from the container's right side, or have a label be placed at the middle of an input box, or other stuff like that).

> And many apps that would benefit greatly from being resizable were non-resizeable instead, just because it was easier.

Maybe, but Delphi had anchor fields that you could use to make everything resize nicely.

The problem with that time period was that most applications were designed to not be resizeable, including most of the ones that came with Windows itself.

We still have that - some of the Windows programs right now can't be resized (Thinking specifically of dialogs and windows for device manager->driver details, or explorer->options).

This wasn't a Delphi problem at all; it was a Windows problem because that was the convention on Windows at the time.[1]

[1] EDIT: s/Windows/GUI systems/g

> This wasn't a Delphi problem at all; it was a Windows problem because that was the convention on Windows at the time.

And I don't think other GUI systems were all that much better. Eg MacOS has plenty of fixed size stuff right now.

Yeah; my comment specifically called out Windows, but to be fair, all the GUI systems at the time had the same restrictions.

It was convention across all GUI systems.

No... Motif/CDE had resizable/constraint layout in early 90's

Native VCL components (which doesn't necessarily mean Delphi - could also be C++Builder) were always much more common in Delphi apps, from what I remember.

As far as COM and ActiveX, though, the ability to package them side by side in the app install folder and describe them using XML (in the app manifest) rather than registry has been around since WinXP.

And these programs, compiled in the ninetees, still run today on modern Windows with a functional UI. Microsoft, Borland and others then built developer tools and platforms to last. I think that cross-platform (including web) and touch changed the game because it wasn’t a simple and controlled ecosystem anymore. All of Microsoft’s successors to Win32 seem to be replaced sooner or later by something else, even in the Windows ecosystem, with Win32 still being supported. Let alone the web frameworks.

I also feel like this created a kind of positivity at the time rarely experienced today. I remember these Delphi conferences I used to go to as a teenager with my dad with many of the names Marco mentioned in his acknowledgments present, including himself. It was really rapid application development (RAD) without many of the stuff that parent mentions that brings so much struggle today (frontend) software development. People were having fun building software.

I’m happy to see that most of these names still seem to be able to make a living off Delphi. There’s probably still a lot of critical Windows enterprise software being maintained that needs consulting and support. Including my dad’s software he wrote 30 years ago which is still being maintained and used daily.

> There’s probably still a lot of critical Windows enterprise software being maintained that needs consulting and support.

At my old company, it took 2 years and $2 million to re-write an application in Java. That's the cheapest project that Accenture would take.

So as long as you keep your legacy service contracts under that, you're fine. It might even be $3 million now with the new Java licensing terms.

I worked for a company, back in 2007, who had two products, one written in C++ and WxWidgets, and another written in Delphi. The Delphi product was an online publishing platform, running on IIS. They started hiring like crazy to create a new Java based platform, they must have spend millions only to scrap the whole thing a year or two in. I left just as that was happening, as did many others. Nobody wanted to go from working on the new hotness to working on the ageing Delphi platform. I think they kept it running for another five years or so, then pivoted to an online ad platform and then bankruptcy.

For online I don't think Borland, or whoever owned Delhi back then, really had the resources to keep up with everything else. Even today it's pretty expensive to buy the tooling from Embarcadero to keep projects alive, but probably cheaper and less risky that porting to another language.

Delphi and Visual Basic 6 were definitely not the pinnacle of UI development.

For example, all layout was pixel based. Making windows resizable required much complex ad-hoc code, and internationalization was hard as well. Very early in my career, I have spent person months clicking through every single screen in a large desktop application to find words cut off due to words having different lengths (measured in pixel) in different languages. I knew what "Ok" and "Cancel" meant in half a dozen languages. At the time, Java was really breaking ground with container based layouts in Swing. Delphi and Visual Basic caught up only in the .NET era.

"easy UI development" Java never really got that part right.

Yes it did, IDE tooling was the answer, and Netbeans still provides its Matisse, WindowBuilder on Eclipse, and as does InteliJ.

Back in the day, JBuilder offered a Delphi like experience.

What I would agree is that the thing that actually made Swing hard are the defaults, which required books like "Filthy Rich Clients" as gate into making wow Swing applications.

> Delphi and Visual Basic 6 were definitely not the pinnacle of UI development.

> All layout was pixel based.

I'd say that was a very reasonable trade-off at the time, when most screens were somewhere between 640x480 and 1024x768 resolutions at 72 DPI. This simplified UI design sufficiently enough that VB/Delphi provided an optimal solution that, yes in hindsight, would most accurately be described as a "local maxima" for the environment and the time.

> Making windows resizable required much complex ad-hoc code

I remember there were ActiveX controls one could drop onto their form that would attempt to derive the layout based on initial positioning of controls, i.e. that a lower row of buttons should be anchored to the bottom of the window, while textboxes are took up a larger area would automagically resize with the window.

Don't know about VB6, but at least Delphi had Align property and TPanel/TGroupBox. Together, it allowed to make apps that handle resizing just fine without any custom logic.

(it has been a very long time, but I think those only handled internal composition and not overall window size.. so you'd still need some custom code if you wanted dialogs as compact as possible. But as long as you never missed setting Align property, you did _not_ have to manually resize every control for different text/font size).

It's actually not entirely correct with respect to VB6. It did indeed use absolute layouts, but unlike Delphi with its pixel units, in VB everything was measured in "twips" (1⁄1440 of inch, or 1⁄20 of point). This would then be converted to actual pixels based on the DPI setting of the system.

VB6 (and its predecessors) didn't ship with windows resizing and alignment out of the box, but there were 3rd party components that did that nicely. This happened way before Java.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160406102051/http://vbrad.com/...

I came from Visual C++/Basic world when I first got my Mac and dove into Xcode for the first time (2002? 2003?). Flexible layouts, connecting UI elements to datasources, localization...

Oh my was I amazed.

Visual Basic could connect UI elements to data sources.

Layout managers were well established industry-wide by the 90s, which is where I started using them.

Absolutely - Qt had already figured out how to do layout before Swing was much of a thing (AWT doesn't count, yuck).

I suspected AWT had layout managers as well, so looked it up:

https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/awt/class-use...

Believe that was there from the beginning, mid 90s.

You can’t look at the language in isolation. Visual Basic was backed by the fantastic Visual Studio for development. That ecosystem was way more mature than Java ever got with Swing et al. IMO, if there’s one thing MS ever did right, it was how they nailed WYSIWYG GUI app development. Now they’re going backwards with the WinUI XAML crap.

> Now ... XAML

Microsoft has been pushing XAML for long enough that it could drink, drive and vote in my country

The experience has become worse with WinUI 3. They got rid of the designer view. So now you're developing the UX code first. This is very unlike the prior paradigm, where you would typically drag and drop the components in your workspace/design view and then code the interactions. It is precisely what made Windows programming so accessible to the millions of developers. This is a step in the wrong direction IMO.

VB6 was its own thing separate from Visual Studio.

> For example, all layout was pixel based.

These sort of excuses always come up when Delphi and its insane productivity is mentioned. The same thing happens in conversations about how slow software has gotten.

High-DPI displays, internationalization, and accessibility are a pain but don't introduce enough complexity to hand-waive away the criticism.

Going a bit off-topic, but the browser is carrying around so many legacy concepts and ideas - it's a complete disaster - but it's the only option. The document object model is slow and weird to use to build reactive user interfaces.

We should demand something better. The browser is a local maximum as an application platform, and we should stop defending it.

The browser is the OS. We can already put WASM on a <canvas> and ignore most of it, but turns out rendering text properly is hard.

Accessibility too

No it wasn't, this keeps being wrongly repeated.

Both had layout managers, they just required a bit more effort to use, and developers as we know are all lazy.

I would love something like Delphi/VB6, but made for web development.

My day job involves working with PeopleTools, which basically does this. Draw forms (and build all of the supporting objects), save them, and they're accessible through a web browser. You don't need to know HTML, CSS, JS, etc (though it can help), and you can knock out a very based CRUD form in no time without writing any code.

I think the Microsoft Power Platform has features similar to this as well.

But neither of these options are very accessible to regular folks. Something that has the ease of development of Delphi, the deployment simplicity that comes with presenting the application via a web browser, and is accessible to regular folks would be incredible.

There was Delphi for PHP

Is https://delphi.fandom.com/wiki/Delphi_for_PHP the one you're thinking of?

This is truly interesting, and the description on that wiki page suggests that it might be exactly what I'm looking for, but it seems like any concrete information about it has vanished.

Its a very old product, and afaik it was discontinued (many) years ago. It was reasonable for crud applications, nowadays you can do rougly the same with any oss airtable clone. Could have been a great tool, but unfortunely poor marketing and lack of vision killed the product.

Xojo Web aims to do exactly what you describe.

https://xojo.com/products/web.php

I haven't really used it - I'm just a hobbyist coder who enjoys the VB6 style development of the desktop version of Xojo.

Wow, a quick cruise through the documentation suggests that this is EXACTLY the kind of thing I'm looking for!

I find myself waffling between "This is too expensive for me to play around with at home" and "Considering what this does, $399 really isn't that bad..."

There is a free trial or a $100 personal use version or some such, at least there was, when I checked it out a while ago.

There's a $100 one for making desktop apps with SQLite support, which doesn't interest me. $399 gets you to the Web tier with PostgreSQL support, which is the feature set I'm most interested in.

I'm still tempted...

I was so in love with Delphi 7 (didn't care much for Delphi 8, didn't try any version after). I don't think I've ever been more excited about a programming language/environment as when I was easily and quickly creating desktop applications with Delphi 7.

Including being high level, low level systems programming, and compiled ahead of time.

It is incredible that given its heritage, we have had to wait 25 years for .NET to finally provide a similar experience, and there are still some rough edges.

While it offered a way to perform AOT compilation, NGEN was only meant for fast startup and nothing else.

> It is incredible that given its heritage, we have had to wait 25 years for .NET to finally provide a similar experience

It's even the same person: Microsoft poached Anders Hejlsberg, creator of both Turbo Pascal and Delphi, to architect .net.

This myth keeps being repeated.

If anyone poached Anders Hejlberg, it was the ex-Borland friends working at Microsoft, under the usual referral program many companies have.

Actual history behind on what happened,

"Anders Hejlsberg: A craftsman of computer language"

https://behindthetech.libsynpro.com/001-anders-hejlsberg-a-c...

And yes that is why .NET not having proper AOT in 2001 was such a disappointment.

It is the result of cheaping out by the entire tech industry. Responsive design to support multiple resolutions and pixel density was extrapolated to use a single framework (HTML+JS+CSS) for every single device that exists. Except for a few, most businesses deploy Web based apps on browsers, desktop apps and mobile phones. Usually from the same monorepo. Add developer laziness and unnecessarily tight deadlines, we end up in the current situation.

These days, I'd say Flutter is the closest alternative to something like VB6 or Delphi.

While I get the aversion, HTML+CSS is a pretty good combination for layout and there are efforts towards application tooling for other languages. That said, I don't dislike JS/TS nearly as much as some on here. It's a highly expressive language that's flexible enough to get things done in a number of ways. And yeah, the overhead is kind of crazy, especially when devs bring in massive dependency chains. As a whole, it's still one of the better options for getting an application "everywhere".

One reason for this is when the big players move their business models over to taking your data and renting it back to you, there's no profit motive in pushing state-of-the-art ux when they just give their apps away to act like honeypots. MSFT gives their stuff away if you get on Azure. Atlassian charges 14 bucks a seat if you use their cloud. Lots of people who use this stuff have a laptop plus a bigger monitor their company bought to get their work done and it's like staring into an empty desert every day.

Yep. I tried to find something similar. I tried Lazarus, Visual C#, Qt Studio. It's all a sad imitation of what we had with VB6 and Delphi.

> Yep. I tried to find something similar. I tried Lazarus, Visual C#, Qt Studio. It's all a sad imitation of what we had with VB6 and Delphi.

What's wrong with Lazarus, compared to Delphi?

Lazarus is a good attempt to mimic Delphi, but it suffers from GUI jank. It uses the GTK GUI library, which in my experience is hard to get good performance out of. For example, when dragging things around it hitches and lags, instead of a smooth drag action. Another thing is the toolbar buttons are far too small for 2025. Maybe there's an option somewhere, but I couldn't find it. I also noticed that Lazarus has more buttons and options on-screen than Delphi did. This could be seen as "features" but it's also "clutter". And the extra features on-screen are not that useful, at least to me as someone who used Delphi a long time ago.

Lazarus uses LCL, which has many backends, of which Gtk is but one. But you can also use e.g. the Qt version: https://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Qt5_Interface. On Windows, they have a native Win32 implementation of LCL, same as Delphi did in VCL.

Lazarus real problem, looks to be that they refused to embrace using it for mobile development. Which is odd. Almost as if Delphi's owner wouldn't allow it. Lazarus seems to handicap itself, for unknown reasons. They finally and kind of have an Android solution, from an independent contributor, but it doesn't blend so well with the desktop solution.

> Lazarus real problem, looks to be that they refused to embrace using it for mobile development. Which is odd. Almost as if Delphi's owner wouldn't allow it. Lazarus seems to handicap itself, for unknown reasons. They finally and kind of have an Android solution, from an independent contributor, but it doesn't blend so well with the desktop solution.

I'd like to know more about this. Any links to the discussions? My google-fu is failing me right now.

That Lazarus can be used for Android, comes from jmpessoa[1]. He is an independent, that's not part of the developer team. Users were asking and begging, for years, for a Lazarus solution to develop mobile apps (check the OS section of their forum). The developers basically ignored and refused. Their users are still begging for an iOS solution. Even though, the person who jmpessoa looks to have partially got the idea from to create LAMW (Lazarus Android Module Wizard), used it to create iOS components (but many years ago).

So, even though Android and iOS modules could be more thoroughly integrated into Lazarus or they putting forth an integrated LCL based solution, they're not. That's very weird. From the perspective of how much more useful Lazarus can be, and from their users asking for it.

[1] https://github.com/jmpessoa (LAMW)

I was several times required to build simple web apps, and it wasn't hard. I used Python, Flask, Jinja2, Bootstrap, and maybe one or two functions from jQuery for AJAX. It was very easy, and I know only Python and basic HTML and CSS. I don't know any JS/TS because I'm a Computer Vision Engineer.

These web apps show tables with data, images with figures, and some controls to request calculations or data from a server. jQuery is used to update the drop-down list according to previous choices.

Indeed, if you attempt to look for modern windows/mac UI development tools it's either Visual Studio/C# or nothing. It's like development in that direction has ceased. Modern languages require complex tooling to get from zero to a UI, IE Rust/Go/Python, etc.

Rider supports AvaloniaUI and Uno. And both also ship extensions for Visual Studio Code.

You are not tied to Visual Studio or Windows (as in, you can target Windows and Linux when using macOS, or Windows and macOS when using Linux).

Rust is generally anemic if you need a visual editor. Go and Python are in even worse state (there are no production-ready frameworks for Go to do cross-plat GUI app dev).

The biggest alternative so far is Flutter.

I remember a product called PHP builder, that was out for awhile. It was supposed to make it easier to create and deploy PHP apps.

It failed within a year or two.

Isn't Retool (https://retool.com) like modern-day Delphi?

I can't answer, because that website is so incredibly disorienting I had to close it after scrolling for a few seconds

That comment seemed a little bit snide to me, so I visited the website just to prove you wrong. Unfortunately, it was so disorienting I had to close it after scrolling for a few seconds :0

Is there kinda gui builder for web?

Interface Builder for NeXT stuff let you build a UI and test it quickly

I'm not going to minor the merits of Delphi, but this...

> Especially on the web side, where even a single view sometimes requires having multiple unrelated dependencies (packers, builders, transpilers, etc.),

... is only true if you jumped on the SPA bandwagon. Things don't have to be this complicated.

I have barely 2 years of experience in software development, so I wasn't around doing Delphi and stuff (I vagely remember seeing a Pascal book at my grandparent's).

However I feel like the current paradigm of declarative ui, with automatic re-render, like React (and what I actually use: Compose Multiplatform) is very good for producing maintainable applications and encourages UI decoupling.

I agree that the dependency hell and project setup parts on the web are horrible, but I wouldn't say it's part of "UI Development".

> I vagely remember seeing a Pascal book at my grandparent's).

First time someone used “grandparent” and I could relate :-)

My grandfather, on the other hand, was a gold miner in Alaska, then returned to Seattle in the 1920s just in time for the Great Depression. So I’m just a bit older than you ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com