>> {quote:title=Loren Szendre wrote:}{quote}
>> The answer, of course, is that I won't be able to. It took DevEx many
>> months to fully adapt to Unicode! It would take them 3 centuries to
>> adapt all that code that is ultimately based on the WinAPI, and make
>> that library work the same on Windows, Linux and Mac.
>
> Richness of 3rd party offerings (be it free or commercial) was always the strong reason for choosing Delphi (as it was for Turbo Pascal (my first one was on CP/M)). I'm afraid that that market is diminishing...
Yeah, I hear a lot about the 3rd party market diminishing. But that's
not a bad thing, necessarily. 8-10 years ago, if you searched the
Internet for a something like Com Port components, you would find many
(perhaps dozens) available, some free, some shareware and some fully
commercial. You don't know right away which are buggy, which are about
to be dropped from active development (or are already dropped, but you
just don't know it), or which are built by developers that really
understand the topic, or which had the love and attention to make a
truly useful and robust component.
With all those issues, at this point in Delphi's maturity, many of the
poorly designed or buggy components have dropped from view. What usually
remains is 1-3 really good choices.
And there are many major vendors who are very actively maintaining and
adding new offerings and features to their Delphi component libraries. I
still hear of many developers that avoid 3rd party components like the
plague. If that works for them, fine. But for my company, the benefit
our apps receive, and the cost-benefit ratio of these components
(spending thousands of hours in-house to create them, versus licensing
them) -- make it a no-brainer for us. And we don't license components
without source.
I believe the 3rd party market is more than sufficient for Delphi. Take,
for instance, DevEx and TMS. We use significant numbers of components
from both companies, and find that between the two, there are ample
options. Would I really be benefited by having 30 products to sort
through? I doubt it.
And for the really off-beat stuff, there is still plenty out there that
can be adapted to the latest Delphi, without too much work.
Loren sZendre