Delphi for php. the return of the era of darkness

Though, the IDE was released in the middle of 2007, I i’ve installed it just a few days ago.

The very significant thing that there wasn’t much buzz about delphi for php. Though, buzz in my country is rather strong. Couse delphi traditionally was the most popular development platform.

I DON’T LIKE BORLAND! Though, i was using Delphi and C++ Builder for a long time. I maked up 2 rather strong projects with them. But I DON’T LIKE them. Couse they don’t encourage me to grow, to find more elegant solutions.

They keep silence about refactoring, unit testing, profiling, about design patterns(MVC first of all), version controll, team work and all that buzz-stuff. They have their own complete framework VCL and design editor. That’s all. And they think that is enough for most of the projects. And perhaps they may be right. That’s almost enough for most of individual light business projects. Though I remeber the time of my trying to make up new component combining TDBGreed and TComboBox. That was awfull and disgusting. Because of limitations of VCL. The main aim of the delphi was to replace visual basic. And they get a great success, in my country at least.

Delphi for PHP is totally the same. It’s designed for so-called Rapid Application Development. It’s fun and it’s exciting when you watch demos (helo-world and database-access). But when you’ve installed it, the very first thought is “wait a minute, am I in 2000 again? What’s a hell?? Where is all that cool stuff that all IDE have nowadays?”

Where is:

1) version controll integration

2) php doc

3) unit testing

4) refactoring patterns (through, zend studio neon is rather poor in refactoring too, but it has 3 patterns)

5) class templates

etc

Where? I can’t find it.

Where is smart code analyzer/intellisense? Why I see only dumb, clumsy peace of smth?When i’ve created a new so-called Unit (а plain file with only “<?php ?>”-content) it doesn’t even recognized my class members after all, and couldn’t even complete “public function __constr” line.

It’s the same dumb delphi.

I agree that php needs RAD tools. I agree that php needs frameworks like VCL. They may be very convinient sometimes. Php needs WYSIWYG editor, like jsf and asp.net have.
But in the times when zend struggle to make up php more professional-like(i would rather say more java-like), borland may cause a lot of harm to young php society(i mean society where there are a lot of not very experienced students).

In my country there are still a lot of so-called php-coders, who are stuck in “php 4″.

When people migrated from borland pascal (using it without any knowledge about OOP) to delphi that wasn’t very cool. Couse most of them started to use delphi in some strange ugly half-procedural half-object orientired manner. Borland Delphi doesn’t encourage coders to be more professional, to grow up. It encourage them just to find complete solutions(new vcl-components) and use them. For those who just yesterday struggle to write “helo-world” program, delphi brought sweet feelings “look, mom, i’m making real Apps!”(i felt totally the same, i was 14) When i see some projects of that time(even made up by teams).. wow. they are ugly.

And now if people will start migrating from plain “php 4″ to “delphi for php”. that will be the same thing. I can quite imagine that soon will start “look, mom, i’m making sites!” disaster. and that will be “return of the era of darkness” but in web

Googling aroung didn’t show up any serious projects base on the platform. Some examples look like a bad joke. But strengthen the “déjà vu”-feelings.

PS here is a good review of VCL for PHP framework drawbacks