Your reviewer promised to review Delphi 2009, but so much time have passed and ended-up reviewing Delphi XE edition.
Delphi XE stands for "Delphi Extreme Edition" or "XE" but it
sounds more like "Delphi Exorcist Edition".
This version of Delphi is for the Delphi faithful. There is no
other reason to buy it (unless you happen to be a
Troll Tool vendor). This version of Delphi is simply an attempt for Embarcadero to satisfy people who brought an over-priced yearly SA subscription and expect a new upgrade during the 12-months of their subscription. The people who brought last year's Delphi edition without SA (
waiting years for bug-fixes) get screwed and all the complaints start to look like insult-sword-fighting Monkey Island style.
Since Embarcadero choose to call it "XE", your reviewer found the closest matching word to be "Exorcist" so hence, "Exorcist Edition" would be in appropriate humor.
17-page Embarcadero Review
The biggest problem with the people at Embarcadero is they seem to have this bad habit of not writing down anything meaningful. Reading Ander Olsson's blog (Hacker's Corner), you would expect it to be filled with technical articles, tips, advice, excellent how-to-do things in Delphi... Instead, it is filled with job-postings, chatter and non-existent
page 2.
The same goes with David Intersimone's website. It was only until a year ago your reviewer recommended putting a Wiki that the
documentation wiki was written.
The only decent documentation you'd ever get about Delphi are from outsiders, like Mr. Marco Cantu, Dr. Bob, the former Delphi Magazine (UK), InfoCann Delphi Magazine (USA), blog postings and the huge Google Newsgroup archive.
There is so much misleading information on Embacardero's website that SD times managed to write a totally misleading article on next year's (or maybe 2012) version of Delphi.
There are no books written for Delphi 2011 (I could only count on Mr. Marco Cantu's Delphi 2010 handbook), just blog postings, bits and pieces of information here and there.
64-bit Delphi. When?
The development of the Delphi 64-bit edition must be very slow. Those waiting would have moved over to Visual C++/64-bits, GCC or FreePascal/64...
1) There is only just twitter feeds, and some chatter about it. The people at Embarcadero must have been so
lazy or just didn't care about getting the news about Delphi/64 - there have been essentially no blog postings, no documentation primers, almost
nothing about Delphi/64.
2) The people who are waiting for Delphi/64 would have conveniently moved their source-code base over to QT or WxWidget or NET or
XCode.
Even the person who wrote the Delphi Distiller (a pirate application to circumvent Delphi's weak copy protection), Dr Alvin started to use QT and stopped using Delphi.
Delphi Pricing
Satirical picture showing a bearded person (guess who?), two other people in Embarcadero-black attire milking the Delphi cash-cow.
If there was anything to say about pricing, it is Embarcadero releasing a new version of Delphi every year to appease those who brought the Software Assurance. If they didn’t release a new version every year, Embarcadero would be SA-dammed by their customers.
Since this Software Assurance idea came out, it seems to be an annual affair to milk the Delphi faithful of their hard-earned money by assuring them upgrades every year. The better term for this is temple-tax or tithe since older versions of Delphi is often depicted as a temple. In order to get updates to the Delphi VCL, updates to the compiler, you had no choice but to either buy a new license or upgrade.
The price for a new version of Delphi has increased to either Euros 800 or US$800 (more like US$950 after including taxes) depending on where you live (excluding S&H and local taxes). Pricing for the most expensive edition of Delphi is around Euros 4,000. One fact has become certain – between Taxes and Death, you have to pay for Delphi and Delphi-related upgrades.
For hobbyists, the cost of Delphi and annual upgrade deters the hobbyists.
The ability to buy Delphi Professional at 10% from list price with heavy restrictions makes no sense.
The current pricing structure of annual upgrades, SA and the like, destroys the Delphi developer base.
Return on Investment: Mostly underwater.
The irony of an obese man diving underwater is not lost considering the inability to sell a copy of Delphi to dispose of assets and continual depreciation results in every copy having US$0.00 resale value. The people who buy used copies of Delphi (other than from official sources) do not get their orders honored or have future problems with Embarcadero.
For the uninformed, the way how business owners buy Delphi is by taking a cash/credit or loan. For example, some business owners take huge loans (e.g., US$50,000 loan) to start a business. Since the resale price of Delphi is US$0.00, and if the owners (and employees) within the loan-period cannot generate enough revenue to repay the initial business loan, the loan goes “underwater”.
The price of Delphi (and salary/wages to software developers) itself discourages jobs and new hiring. I would really urge Mr. David Intersimone to take the real Underwater challenge – take a big loan (preferably request for US$500,000), hire all the exert Delphi developers and develop a new product… then find yourself gnashing, swearing at every Delphi bug there is out there, missing features, bad or non-existent IntraWeb features, missing 64-bit, missing OSX support, bad documentation (and so on). Make sure all of them are properly licensed and use all-Delphi applications. Avoid Java or Visual C++ written products (like Atlissian Confluence, Eclipse, etc.) and do it for a couple of years… It would be really fun to insult and mock the customers (like the current making fun of people on newsgroups) when products doesn’t perform as expected, the inability to make a fully “built-using-Dephi” website. There are also the joys of having the bank take away everything when the business fails and falling behind payments.
Maybe Embarcadero people wearing black means sobering-up to the reality that Embarcadero need to stop selecting “good” reviews and start listening to their customers.
DelphiHater’s Roadmap is more accurate
Mr. Michael Rezlog and the hidden project manager (whose identity is hidden or not posted on the newsgroup) must be reading my blog.
Few months ago, I posted about Delphi Ultimatum (
http://delphihaters.blogspot.com/2009/11/delphi-ultimatum.html) and how those suggestions were taken seriously.
Delphi XE has:
a) working memory leak checker and profiler. (Automated QA is now included)
b) build manager. (Final Builder, crippled is now included)
c) parts of GExperts and probably CNPack is now part of Delphi.
d) IPWorks (after looking at so many complaints with Indy)
e) Database driver source-code is available.
Reusing Last Year’s Promotion Materials
Your reviewer had amusing time looking at Delphi promotion material. It looks like they have been re-used from last year. You can notice all the items marked "Delphi 2010", "Delphi 2009", as it that needs to be considered.
Blackfish – More love needed
The bitter taste of former Borland, DevCo and CodeGear follies must have come one full cycle now. The latest database offering BlackFish (why not call it Jellyfish instead?) must have felt the brunt of the typical build-deploy-dump cycle that almost every Delphi developer encountered.
The first casualty is the venerable DBF and Paradox format. Borland
could have fixed all the bugs in the Borland Database Engine, but decided to depreciate it instead. That left people who used DBF and Paradox that bad taste in their mouth and jump to Sybase Advantage Server. Then the same went for ADO, renamed DBGO, then left there almost untouched for almost 14 years (1997-2011) with no new features added while the original ADO layer (using 2.1) was upgraded to 2.9.
If Embarcadero wants forgiveness, it would have continued to maintain it, and make BlackFish more attractive to both developers and end-users.
Personally, your reviewer won’t use Blackfish. If I was to use something, I would want to use something that’s easy to use like Apache CouchDB, MongoDB or if the customer is a Microsoft-shop, MSSQL.
End of part 1. Part 2 will come with more technical details.
