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How to improve our productivity when starting new project using Delphi?
For me, I create a template project including splash screen, primary data module with default component and all data-aware subroutines (open, close, query, default when failed to open DB, etc), and save the template in my repository. (I use all my own frames and unit in the project, so everything always be created automatically when I choose : New Project and choosing my template.)
Questions:
Is there any other way to improve reusability using Delphi?
What free open source framework (like Jedi) / IDE PLugins (like GExpert) you think is best to use using Delphi?
Pardon me if this question has been asked before.
For Q1: Use mature libraries which do for you the grunt work: DevExpress -or- TMS for UI (JEDI's JVCL also is very good), FastReport for reporting. Choose also a good connectivity framework (it depends on your db back-end) in order to have many day-to-day tasks solved OOTB. Also, if you're familiar with OPF have a look at InstantObjects. I heard that's very nice.
For Q2: See the IDE enchancements from cnpack.org
Also it will help to slowly build your own specialized framework/set of tools. Not something very big but as a quick way to get some things done in your way. Always try to design for reuse, even if it takes a little bit longer in the beginning.
For larger applications, the key to productivity is to work at a higher abstraction level than data module and database.
The database has a small set of types. In your domain you are likely to have default mappings from domain types to database types. You'll also have validators and formatters for them.
You'll have default reports, filters and search (windows, panels, sql queries) for your domain entities. You'll have role-based access control to them.
Take a look at domain-driven development.
One of my big gains in reusability in recent years has been moving to an ORM layer (I use tiopf) to separate out my business objects from the database.
As an example, I have db persisted, background threaded email objects. To add them to another application, I add in the required units and add a few lines of configuration (table/field mapping). Similarly I have user objects, generic lookup lists and the like all of which can be added to different projects for the price of initial configuration. This works on different databases without any changes other than configuration.
tiopf is my ORM of choice (read my overview here) but there are numerous others.
Defining the exact range of applications you want to make is a good first step. Improving productivity is nearly always related to specialization. General tools is just an extremely small percentile of productivity. I'd rather search (or make) specialized frameworks in my line of work if I really wanted to boost productivity.
I don't use GExperts, or another plugin. I don't benefit greatly (being able to grep just fine on the cmdline) in productivity, and any crash that can be avoided due to problems in the plugin is then a pre.
I used ModelMaker with Delphi. It is really nice tool that lets you draw objects and then can generate code based on templates you write.
It can speed up things when there is number of similar classes in project.
For Q2: GExperts is useful. The grep search comes in particularly handy, although the search / replace can cause odd side affects (inserting characters it shouldn't!).
I know you mentioned free / open source, but Castalia is very good. The refactoring methods work well and I like the structural highlighting, which makes it much easier to work with code (I did originally use CodeRush for this but it went Visual Studio only). The Bookmark stack is also handy for quick going back and forth through code.
Also, if you are a team, look for ways to improve your development process. Besides using Delphi as your implementation language, what are your project management methods? What source code management system do you use? What is your build system? Do you use automated testing methods? etc.
When I introduced Scrum at a previous employer, we got an almost immediate 50% improvement in team productivity. So check out the various Agile methodologies.
For true reusability, try to think in interfaces and try to black box as much as possible. Patterns are everywhere, research them and put them into practice.
When dealing with objects, as much as possible use the abstract, or an interface rather than a concrete implementation. Just be careful of taking this too far. Too many abastractions can add complexity and make debugging harder.
Units containing your business rules should be used by your gui. Units containing business rules should never themselves directly use gui units.
When I ask questions like this about "what is the best thing to do or to use" they are quickly removed from the site by the moderators.
In my opinion, you are right to use the sample template. Also #John Thomas is correct. But you can go beyond:
Use a template for database procedures and functions to work with requests;
Try to put the most of the database logic inside the database using stored procedures and functions. This way you don't have to worry about selecting what is common use and what is specific to current project;
Use a template for main menu and main screen;
Instead of crating many windows, create one TFrame for each module of your application and reserve a place in the main screen to load them. Create an object of this frame in memory only when the user clicks it's menu. This way, your system gets faster and more memory economic;
Reuse those frames by creating base frames with the common functionality and layout and them create new frames descendants from it.
Just great!
Related
I know a lot of questions have been asked about VB6 migration (and I've read most of them), but I'm still not entirely certain on what the best way to go about this is.
We have a client that we built an order tracking application for about a decade back and they came to us this week saying they were having some issues with it. The app was written entirely in VB6, which has been something of a hassle as tracking down the necessary tools to work with a project so old took some considerable effort. In an effort to make any future maintenance less of a headache, my boss wants to pitch the idea to them of updating the app to .net and wants to know what exactly that would entail. I've never done anything like this before, but what I've read (both here and elsewhere) suggests that Microsoft's "auto-update" from VB6 to .net simply doesn't work very well and I'd pretty much have to rebuild the app from the ground up.
To get to the crux of my question: is this the case? Would I pretty much just need to rewrite it, or is there another means of going about this that could/would save me a lot of time/effort?
Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
VB6 and VB.NET are radically different. The syntax has changed, and so has the underlying structures, forms, custom controls, and almost every single aspect you can possibly think about.
A complete redesign and reassessment of needs and functionality is imperative. With .NET the plethora of new libraries and features supersede the antiquated VB6 libraries, OCXs, etc. Also if you feel bold, you can migrate your code to C# and other CIL languages aside from VB.
Out of hand, the Microsoft migration tool will not do much. Moreover, it also depends on whether you have your business logic well separated from your GUI. Otherwise, it will make it even harder. Depending on the size of your application, it might make it quite expensive. Another possible solution you might consider is to run your app in a virtual environment or on a remote app http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc730673(v=ws.10).aspx that will ease the deployment pain.
I have also researched this topic.
Try the smart rewrite solution that converts 95% of the code automatically.
first, run your app through the assessment wizard to determine estimated costs and resources needed.
http://visualwebgui.com/Gizmox/Solutions/InstantbCloudmoveb/tabid/744/Default.aspx
I have a legacy desktop accounting application developed using Delphi 5 & Paradox, which I intend to migrate to a web based Silverlight (for the sake of UX) application with SQL Server.
Can anybody suggest a way to implement this quickly?
I know this is a very open-ended question and I am not looking for concrete answers. Instead opinion/experiences from SO users.
My main concern is about migration approach, possible architecture and design patterns (for SL I know of MVVM) implementation.
Quickly? That's what every manager wants, but I doubt it.
You have fundamentally different models of UIs, and different programming languages.
Unless these applications are small, it is unlikely that will be able to convert them by hand in any short period of time (or even by yourself as it appears the OP implies "I intend").
Gartner Group has analyzed manual migrations, and suggests if everything is "similar" the actual conversion rate is ~~ 150 lines/day, which is possible because you are translating more or less directly from a working, debugged application. (Just how big is the application in SLOC?) So, if you have 75,000 lines of code, you're looking at 500 man-days minimum. You might make the case that Delphi as programming langauges and C# are similar. You cannot reasonably make that case for the Delphi UI and Silverlight, so this estimate is a lower bound.
There are those that say, "just throw it away and recode it from scratch". Unless your productivity exceeds 150 debugged lines of code per day [classic software engineering texts will tell you it is much smaller than this] this will take you even longer. Usually it fails because you end up forgetting what features exist in the current program, and rediscover them late in development or worse after an attempted reployment. Usually what happens is the old application continues to evolve while the new one is being built (remember, you're 500 man-days away from the new one minimum!) and the new one has to play catchup with these changes. If the application has any serious scale (e.g., a million lines) this often prevents the new one from ever being servicable. Another way to think about this, "how long did it take to build the original application?", and "why should building a replacement be enormously easier?". YMMV, if you can work miracles.
My very biased opinion (I build langauge translation tools) is that one of the most practical ways to do this is automated translation. This has its costs, too; they aren't off-the-shelf items no matter what somebody tells you. You have set up the translator, and that also takes a lot of energy, but that energy is proportional to the size of the language and (UI) library features used, rather than the application size, so it is far more effective as the program gets large. This is still on the order of hundreds of man-days to code and test for just for the langauge translation part. The difference is that once set up, you can apply it to the existing application of whatever size in whatever state it happens to be in. There's more complications than this, but this approach overcomes the "can't catch up" problem of manual conversions, and the "can't get enough coders to manually translate it".
For more details, see my answer on how to translate between languages.
If your application is relatively small, there are IMHO no good answers. Hand translation or recoding are likely your only (ugly) choices.
My suggestion would be to create "value add" extras and updates to your application using Silverlight as and when the need for extra functionality comes up until you've got something resembling a full product.
To me developing Silverlight seems to take a very long time and the UX for a business application isn't massively improved over say ASP.NET Ajax (if the Ajax is done properly). I imagine if you were to sit down today and completely re-write a decent size application in Silverlight then Silverlight would be end of life before your development is completed (unless you threw a massive team at it of course)
If your business logic is well separated from the UI, you can start with "porting" your code to Delphi Prism rather than C#. This offers shorter migration path. If your business logic is tightly coupled with UI (as it happened frequently 10-15 years ago), then rewriting everything from scratch could be a better idea.
And once you have all the code in Pascal up and running, rewriting it in C# (if you need it at the end) is almost trivial with help of decompiler.
I need to speed up my coding, too much work, so I need be able to generate code.
Any tools, any ideas?
Delphi includes Live Templates, a completely scriptable and configurable system for generating code constructs of any size or complexity.
Live Templates are, in my view, one of the more under-appreciated features in Delphi.
Find out how to use them at: http://delphi.wikia.com/wiki/Delphi_Live_Templates
and
http://delphi.wikia.com/wiki/Live_Templates_Technical_Info
Live templates are completely scriptable, meaning you can write Delphi code to do whatever you want with them.
An extendable example can be found here:
http://cc.codegear.com/Item/26420
Not a very good idea IMHO. If you need generator, then probably you have lots of code that looks very similar, so instead of generator, better thing would be to rethink and refactor code you have.
That should result in less code that is easier to maintain and less code in future for similar tasks.
If you are doing database application, then you could use some good visual SQL query builder to help you create queries. That is part that Delphi was not very good (I don't know if it improved in D2007 and D2009)
EDIT - Regarding SQL generation
There's lots of comments about query builder.
Well, I suppose I'm spoiled. As I remember, Delphi before version 6 (or maybe even 5?), had decent visual query builder. I had 0 (zero) bugs in SQL when I selected fields in query designer, opposed to writing SQL by myself.
SQL is just string in Delphi, there is no compiler checking, so this was the best way to ensure that SQL is correctly written.
If you mean something like a modeling tool, you could try out ModelMaker.
Rather than trying to code generate, you should probably just obtain code to do the bulk of what you want to do.
There are hundreds of free products at Sourceforge for Delphi.
And there are hundreds of thousands of code samples at Google Code Search that you can use.
Plus lots thousands of free or purchaseable components at repositories such as Torry's Delphi Pages or Embarcadero's Code Central for Delphi
Using components already made is the fastest way to speed up your coding, and to add capabilities that you would never have been able to.
For me best way is by creating custom components, and then create designer for this component.
I have find that i spent most of the time writing code that read/write values from controls. So i created control that can read, write, validate values, and automatically fill form or stored procedure or directly generate SQL and execute.
Custom designer allows you to setup all properties easy. Now i don't write code for such trivial task i just put control , open designer and set properties and rules that must be satisfied.
ModelMaker Code Explorer speed up my coding in times. It has a nice hotkeys for synchronising implementation and declaration, so if you changed one, you don't have to search for it pair. Also, very nice feature is, method editing dialog. And many more.
Have you tried GExpert? It is a set of tools built to increase the productivity of Delphi and C++Builder programmers by adding several features to the IDE. GExperts is developed as Open Source software.
Other alternative is using project template by saving a framework into the IDE Repository, create your own components and frames.
I wrote a code generator calle CodeTypo. I'm used it in many production environment. You can find it here: http://dade2000.altervista.org/index.php?page=CodeTypo
It's still in beta phase but is usable and reasonably stable.
I'll migrate all content of this old site in the new one (www.danieleteti.it) in english. And I'll add some other info about CodeTypo and code generators.
The thing that sped up my Delphi coding the most was getting CodeRush for Delphi (via a DevExpress VCL subscription for Delphi 5, 6, 7) and setting up a ton of templates.
I am re-writing and/or consolidating a bunch of my "app framework" classes (basic mainform, about box, locking routines & purchase linking, auto-update, datamodule initializer, etc) -- Basically, I have a number of small potential shareware apps that I'm wanting to get out the door, and want to re-use code where I can, as well as build a framework for later apps to save time.
In one app I have auto-updating, I'm using LMD's WebUpdate, and am reasonably happy with it, but given that I'm re-vamping everything, I thought I'd see what the consensus is for "best approach" on this. I don't mind paying for commercial, nor using open source if that's best... just would rather not reinvent the wheel. (I've read: Delphi: How do you auto-update your applications?)
What is the best Auto-update component for Delphi Win 32 apps?
I use TmxWebUpdate. It's free, simple and easy to customize. I also own TMS Component Pack with TWebUpdate, but never really found a good incentive to switch.
I use TWebUpdate from TMS Components and am very happy with it. I haven't used LMD so unfortunately am not able to provide a comparison.
TMS also supply a whole raft of other components so if your re-writes require any else, especially if you want some shiny UI enhancements (TMS have a range of iPhone-style components) then the website is certainly worth a visit.
They seem fairly active in their support forums (although I haven't had need to use them for the WebUpdate component) and they have a fairly regular release cycle.
I have heard good compliment about TWebUpdate from Tmssoftware
also torry has much components for the same job, some are free and others are commericals.
Now what's the best?, it's depend on your needs, you already using one from LMD, which is a good company and I have very good experince with their components, but never used this one.
If you need a specific functionality, or you have some problems with the current one you are using, it's will be better to list them, so you will get a better answers, but it's hard to define the best, because every one has different experience and views.
I use TWebUpdate myself. It works, but the docs are a bit limited and it seems a bit buggy sometimes.
I have looked into LMD's (I have their full component pack), but it seemed to be much more limited than TWebupdate.
I'm also using TWebUpdate, and have to echo stg's comments on quality of support (good), and quality of documentation (spotty -- it's old, and doesn't always reflect their new features immediately).
You'll also find some places that stress the "roll your own" approach.
Remember that part of the auto-update issue is the tools that you will need to create the update "package" at your end. TMS Software makes a tool available for use with TWebUpdate, and it's reasonably well done. In my case, I'm "misusing" the component to deal with multiple files so that I can refresh additional related libraries, text files, etc. The update builder tool isn't really good for that. So there's some manual editing. But the updating part works well.
I'll also add a caution that you need to be careful with updates in Vista (and probably Windows 7). Writing to the protected places in the Program Files hierarchy was problematic for me. You may want to check that out with whatever component you use.
Have you considered Appwave from Embarcadero. It's not free and I don't know the price.
I've got to do some significant development in a large, old, spaghetti-ridden ASP system. I've been away from ASP for a long time, focusing my energies on Rails development.
One basic step I've taken is to refactor pages into subs and functions with meaningful names, so that at least it's easy to understand # the top of the file what's generally going on.
Is there a worthwhile MVC framework for ASP? Or a best practice at how to at least get business logic out of the views? (I remember doing a lot of includes back in the day -- is that still the way to do it?)
I'd love to get some unit testing going for business logic too, but maybe I'm asking too much?
Update:
There are over 200 ASP scripts in the project, some thousands of lines long ;) UGH!
We may opt for the "big rewrite" but until then, when I'm in changing a page, I want to spend a little extra time cleaning up the spaghetti.
Assumptions
The documentation for the Classic ASP system is rather light.
Management is not looking for a rewrite.
Since you have been doing ruby on rails, your (VB/C#) ASP.NET is passable at best.
My experience
I too inherited a classic ASP system that was slapped together willy-nilly by ex excel-vba types. There was a lot of this stuff <font size=3>crap</font> (and sometimes missing closing tags; Argggh!). Over the course of 2.5 years I added a security system, a common library, CSS+XHTML and was able to coerce the thing to validate xhtml1.1 (sans proper mime type, unfortunately) and built a fairly robust and ajaxy reporting system that's being used daily by 80 users.
I used jEdit, with cTags (as mentioned by jamting above), and a bunch of other plugins.
My Advice
Try to create a master include file from which to import all the stuff that's commonly used. Stuff like login/logout, database access, web services, javascript libs, etc.
Do use classes. They are ultra-primitive (no inheritance) but as jamting said, they can be convenient.
Indent the scripts properly.
Comment
Write an external architecture document. I personally use LyX, because it's brain-dead to produce a nicely formatted pdf, but you can use whatever you like. If you use a wiki, get the graphviz add-in installed and use it. It's super easy to make quick diagrams that can be easily modified.
Since I have no idea how substantial the enhancements need to be, I suggest having a good high-level to mid-level architecture document will be quite useful in planning the enhancements.
On the business logic unit tests, the only thing I found that works is setting up an xml-rpc listener in asp that imports the main library and exposes the functions (not subroutines though) in any of the main library's sub-includes, and then build, separately, a unit test system in a language with better support for the stuff that calls the ASP functions through xml-rpc. I use python, but I think Ruby should do the trick. (Does that make sense?). The cool thing is that the person writing the unit-test part of the software does not need to even look at the ASP code, as long as they have decent descriptions of the functions to call, so they can be someone beside you.
There is a project called aspunit at sourceforge but the last release was in 2004 and it's marked as inactive. Never used it but it's pure vbscript. A cursory look at the code tells me it looks like the authors knew what they were doing.
Finally, if you need help, I have some availability to do contract telecommuting work (maybe 8 hours/week max). Follow the link trail for contact info.
Good luck! HTH.
Since a complete rewrite of a working system can be very dangerous i can only give you a small tip: Set up exuberant tags, ctags, on your project. This way you can jump to the definition of a function and sub easy, which i think helps a lot.
On separating logic from "views". VBScript supports som kind of OO with classes. I tend to write classes which do the logic which I include on the asp-page which acts as a "view". Then i hook together the view with the class like Username: <%= MyAccount.UserName %>. The MyAccount class can also have methods like: MyAccount.Login() and so on.
Kind of primitive, but at least you can capsulate some code and hide it from the HTML.
My advice would be to carry on refactoring, classic ASP supports classes, so you should be able to move all everything but the display code into included ASP files which just contain classes.
See this article of details of moving from old fashioned asp towards ASP.NET
Refactoring ASP
Regarding a future direction, I wouldn't aim for ASP.NET web forms, instead I'd go for Microsoft's new MVC framework an add-on to of ASP.NET) It will be much simpler migrating to this from classic ASP.
I use ASPUnit for unit testing some of our classic ASP and find it to be helpful. It may be old, but so is ASP. It's simple, but it does work and you can customize or extend it if necessary.
I've also found Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers to be a helpful guide for finding ways to get some of that old code under test.
Include files can help as long as you keep it simple. At one point I tried creating an include for each class and that didn't work out too well. I like having a couple main includes with common business logic, and for complicated pages sometimes an include with logic for each of those pages. I suppose you could do MVC with a similar setup.
Is there any chance you could move from ASP to ASP.Net? Or are you looking at keeping it in classic ASP, but just cleaning it up. If at all possible, I would recommend moving as much as possible moving to .Net. It looks like you may be rewriting/reorganizing a lot of code anyway, so moving to .Net may not be a lot of extra effort.
Presumably someone else wrote most or all of the system that you're now maintaining. Look for the usual bad habits (repeated code, variables that are too widely scoped, nested if statements, etc.), and refactor as you would any other language. Keep an eye out for recurring things in the same file or different files and abstract them into functions.
If the code was written/maintained by various people, there might be some issues with inconsistent coding style. I find that bringing the code back into line makes it easier to see things that can be refactored.
"Thousands of lines long" makes me suspicious that there may also be situations where loosely-related things are being displayed on the same page. There again, you want to abstract them into separate subroutines.
Eventually you want to be writing objects to help encapsulate stuff like database connectivity, but it will be a while before you get there.
This is very old, but couldn't resist adding my two cents. If you must rewrite, and must continue to use classic ASP:
use JScript! much more powerful, you get inheritance, and there some good side benefits like using the same methods for server-side validation as you use for client-side
you can absolutely do MVC - I wrote an MVC framework, and it was not that many lines of code
you can also generate your model classes automatically with a bit of work. I have some code for this that worked quite well
make sure you are doing parameterized queries, and always returning disconnected recordsets
Software Development Project Management practices indicates that softwares like this are requiring to retire.
I know how hard it is to do the right thing, even more when the responsible manager knows sht and is scared of everything other than the wost way possible.
But still. It's necessary to start working on the development of a new software. It's simply impossible to maintain this one forever, and the loger they wait for retiring it the worse.
If you don't have proper specification/requirements documentation (I think no asp software in the world does, given the noobatry hability of those coders), you'll need both a group of users that know the software features and a manager to be responsible for validating the requirements. You'll need to review every feature and document its requirements.
During that process you'll go learning more about the software and its business. Once you have enough info, you can start developing a new one.