BL> And besides, I need to learn about databases.

RS> Not much point in doing that with a 3GL, you want a decent modern high
RS> performance database instead, the philosophy is completely different.

FM> And he's got it, with Delphi.

Maybe.

FM> Delphi is beautiful.

May look rather ugly if Borland goes down the tubes or
cant find the money to keep it up at the cutting edge |-)

Main problem as I see it with Delphi now is that Borland has lost
the other related components that you would normally use in that
situation, and Paradox itself left quite a bit to be desired too.

Thats gunna bite eventually.

FM> Drag a database icon onto the form, drag a table icon. Fill in
FM> a couple of fields to tell one about the other and the name etc
FM> of the database and hey presto! - a very nice looking, high
FM> performance, Paradox/dbase/anything (almost) database app.

Sure, but any of the decent Win dbs does that stuff. Some have a
much better integration with the other Office type components AS WELL.

FM> Delphi is beautiful.

Dunno, there have always been some very visible evidence of the utterly
desperate financial straits that Borland has got themselves into, and the
mass sackings of the people involved in Delphi doesnt exactly fill you
with confidence that it will be a viable product for even the medium term.

Particularly when its a rather proprietary product,
you're gunna be in rather deep shit if they dont keep up.

I've been doing quite a bit lately with Office Pro 97, particularly
with its rather elegant internet support. Turns out to be completely
fucking trivial to automate getting data of web pages into the db,
just drag an internet shortcut for the page to the db field definition.

That alone may well be a damned good reason to avoid Delphi.

Its also far too bloody expensive. You can buy a full office suite for
the price of Delphi alone. Yet more evidence of Borlands financial plight.

I've also found that those quirks in the Paradox db table design
which were such a total pain in the arse at times with some particular
applications were crippling my designs much more than I thought too.

FM> But from the rest of the message it looked as
FM> if Bob was looking at doing it with text files.

Yeah, it wasnt at all clear just what he was doing in detail,
and I was just trying to suggest that you do want to go the
real db route with that sort of task, its completely mad to
be farting around processing files with 3GLs instead.

I was a bit surprised when processing HTMLs that it doesnt even make
sense to use a 3GL to massage a complex HTML to get some particular
data out of them. Turns out to be extremely simple to just import the file
into a single field per HTML file line and then just crunch the resulting
table with a query that selects the lines you want. No code at all.

The other big thing missing from the Delphi route is complete
integration with the other major apps. Not so crucial in Bobs case,
but for many tasks that alone means that its not necessarily the best
way to go, even if you ignore the price problem the Delphi route has.

I basically think that Borland may well have done its dash now.
@EOT:

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