I hope readers appreciate what a champion for TurboPower tools they have in Roman. These tools were once maintained by a team of developers who were paid to create them over a period of years, with technical support from Borland and with the advantage of a big group of active beta testers and users. Now consider that Roman is attempting to keep these valuable products viable pretty much by himself as a volunteer.
That's a grand goal of making these venerable tools work with all future versions of Delphi, although we don't have any idea really what that means. I suspect that it may be a pretty big challenge to many of the existing third party toolkits. I've ported a number of Delphi packages to Free Pascal and Lazarus and this was quite a challenge, not helped by my own deficiencies as a tool developer (I had never even created a custom component before) and the work-in-progress nature of the Lazarus LCL.
What works for Windows may not make sense on other platforms. Furthermore, it's possible that we're not the audience for Delphi X. As the inexorable shift to mobile computing continues, this will attract lots of new developers of all sorts to the various mobile platforms that emerge. That may be the real audience for Delphi X, not current Delphi users who are comfortable with VCL. Currently with mobile computing that starts with iPhone OS and to get there you have to go through OS X. The iPhone UI classes
(UIWIndow, UIButton, etc.) are pretty close to the traditional OS X Cocoa NS classes (NSWindow, NSButton, etc.), but slimmed down and cleaned up, making them easier to use and understand. If you've worked with the NS classes, you're ready to work with the UI classes for iPhone OS. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if Apple introduced the UI classes for OS X too at some point as a way to consolidate everything in one set of classes.
Part of me hopes that we don't get what we're wishing for, meaning a cross-platform VCL. The new group of mobile developers won't care about VCL and might even reject a tool that makes them use VCL. They want to use the UIAccelerometer class, not some wrapper surrogate.
Thanks.
-Phil
> {quote:title=Loren Szendre wrote:}{quote}
> Roman Kassebaum wrote:
> > Loren,
> >
> >> Sure, there are toolkits. But can any of them come even close to
> >> providing me what I can do with a combination of DevEx, TMS, RemObjects
> >> and TurboPower (my core component libraries)?
> >
> > I don't know which Turbo Power components you are using, but I'm trying
> > to support all upcoming Delphi versions with Abbrevia, LockBox, OnGuard
> > and Orpheus.
>
> I'm glad to hear that. LockBox is the most important for us, followed by
> SysTools, AsyncPro and OnGuard, in that order.
>
> Loren sZendre