Hi guys, we've just launched a new product called TUMONZ (The Ultimate Map
Of New Zealand) www.tumonz.co.nz which is a general mapping utility. It was
written entirely in Delphi with only one third party product (GPS
connection) which was also in Delphi.
The comments I want to make regarding developing it in Dephi are these:
1) In the end we used the RAD aspect of Delphi very little. Only the very
basic main form (with our mapping component on it) was done in the Designer.
We found it extremely limiting and tedious to try and pre-design every thing
at design time. In the end, practially all of the secondary forms (features
and settings) were created dynamically at run time. I have found this in the
past also, that relying on the Form Designer ultimately results in limiting
the design of the form to what is readily available on the components tab -
even though there are heaps of good components freely available, in the end
we found ourselves putting up with limitations of other peoples components.
Doing everything in code forced us to create some very useful components for
editing the settings of underlying objects and allowed us the freedom to do
things the right way rather than the quick way.
2) The RAD aspect of Delphi tends to lead the developer away from OOD
principles. It takes serious discipline to avoid shoving code in event
handlers, but to instead take the time to design things correctly. Having an
overall design methodology helps this of course. RAD design tends to sit a
little uncomfortably inside a design tool such as Model Maker or Rational
Rose.
3) Delphi is a fantastic language to design robust object heirarchies with.
It's strict type rules (compared with C++ etc) lead towards clean design as
long as a little care is taken. The RAD aspect of Delphi is almost an
opposing force leading towards a tangle of unrelated code all sitting in a
single unit (again, only unless a great deal of care is taken).
Hmmm, I didn't mean for this to be a RAD-bash, and I know the value of RAD
to new programmers, but on the whole we had to force ourselves away from a
dependence on it. Perhaps if a decent design tool (such as Model Maker) was
integrated completely into Delphi, and deployed as part of the product, the
tendency towards reliance on RAD would diminish.
comments?
Phil.
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