Remember Delphi? Feb 3, 2016
Borland launced a tool called Delphi in 1995 and it was an instant success. This rapid application development (RAD) tool was inspired by Microsoft's Visual Basic.
The elegancy of Delphi was that everything - from the interface itself to the VCL (visual component library) was programmed in Pascal and would produce single Windows EXE files - or DLL's on a more advanced level. The intuitive interface and component library would not only prove to be a great productivity tool but also a great learning tool.
The drag drop interface of Truecolor in 2004 was a proof of concept. The real idea behind it all was to create a visual PHP tool just like Delphi. It seemed to make sense to come up with a web based tool. Since then the many have come to maturity - tools like Google Drive offer all kind of services.
Still no tool for PHP/JQuery with the simplicity of Delphi is available. Which might have lot to do with the fact that there are some fundamental differences. Delphi uses Pascal for both server sided and client applications. Web applications usually require a server sided programming language (like PHP) to generate HTML and Javascript code. Javascript can be generated to run in a browser, but can itself call and render server sided code.
Another major difference is the way elements are positioned. Visual elements in Delphi are positioned absolutely. While this is possible in CSS it's not desirable.
What is luring is the wonderful abstraction layer of setting properties and running the application. Forms were the standard application type for Delphi - but much more was possible. Components are basically divided between:
- Non-visual: connect to database, database table, query etc.
- Visual: input, text area, panel, chart, grid etc.
In extension to the basic class scopes private, protected and public an additional scope 'published' is introduced. This would show and save (get and set) properties and events on objects.
Project BootRAD
Bootstrap 3 provides a very useful framework for responsive pages and includes several nice form features including validation. Project BootRAD is currently under construction. The general idea is to be able to use drag drop interface to create Bootstrap based form pages.
A basic demo will be provided soon!