The Darwin Race of Languages - part 3

The first sponsor has offered to come up with a price. GurockSoftware will kindly offer a license to SmartInspect as a prize for the race. I'm in contact with a couple of other companies out there. If you are a company that has products suitable for Delphi as well as/or for Visual Studio or any of the other IDEs out there, this might be a good time to have some cheap publicity.

To reassure any of the companies that are thinking of sponsoring: this is not a bashing contest. It's about getting and sharing real life experiences writing software. Taking away the basing of a product just because you think it's bad, is just exactly what started this little contest. Any bashing through comments or otherwise won't get published on the website.

So, if you are still thinking about it, maybe this little notice will help :-)

Bye,
Bart

The Darwin Race of Languages - Part 2

So, the race is on :-) If within 24 hours more than 20 people think they will enter the race, there's no holding back.

There will be a little web site next week on http://www.darwinraceoflanguages.com/. I will need a bit of time to work things out and put them up there, but it's already work in progress.

There are a couple of things that you can help me with:

1. Find C#, C++, Java or other programmers to enter the race. A race is not a race without different horses, is it? Spread the word amongst news groups, friends, colleagues, et cetera.


2. Help me pick a tool or program to build. I'm currently thinking of offering three subjects to pick from. I have the following suggestions:




• A GUI for a Firebird compression tool


• A tool to convert code on the clipboard to html for using it in a blog posting


• (we need more!)


3. Bug your boss to supply us with prices to give away. If you're the boss: handover those goodies :-). A small gesture is fine: it's all about honor anyway.
4. Go to http://www.dzone.com/links/the_darwin_race_of_languages.html and promote that up the ladder so more people in the developers community get a notice of this.

The plan so far

• 1 July: launch of the web site for the race. There will be some explanation on the race, what the purpose is, how to enter, et cetera. It will be a democratic race: there will be a voting system to pick a winner.
• 8 July: entry closes. The race begins. There will a short 2 week sprint in which you can spend as much time as you want to and can afford to. You don't necessarily need to enter a full working program; it's more about how the language and the tool helped or hindered you in your work - you will need to write something about that.
• 22 July: the race closes and the results will be published. Extra points will be awarded to people that documented their experiences during work. The voting begins.
• 29 July: the voting completes and the winner gets the price (whatever it will be...)

Plans of course can be changed, and the format of the race is much open for debate. So, please send in your remarks.

Bye,

Bart

The darwin race of languages

Update: the race is on

It's funny how fanatical people (including me) can get when we are talking about the IDEs that we favor. If someone comes up with some (partly false) statements about out beloved (...) Delphi, we all (including me) jump up and start making a case for our pet. I don't think the guy was expecting that many comments after his posting. I can almost see him scratching his head :-)

Now, I think that's a very good thing. My post about dying Delphi programmers was intended to stir up some things and in the end I might have found a (couple of) new programmer(s). Besides all the public comments I have had hundreds of reactions in my email box. So, I can concluded, the Delphi programmers are still fighting to come out of top of the Darwin race of languages.

Now, I was thinking. There already must be a developer contest out there to compare Delphi to other languages. I couldn't find one though (but that might be because it's still early days yet :-))

How about setting one up? Let's find a small program (if in the end it is also usefull, all the better) and let's see what the results are when developing it with, let's say, Delphi and C#.

Now, before all the comments come in :-) I know that we would probably only compare the capabilities of the programmer, not the language. And, choosing C# would probably mean choosing .Net. If we would use Delphi for Win32 that means a comlpetely different platform. But, nevertheless, I think it would be fun to see what would happen.

So, please send in your suggestions for a small, but usefull program that could be the subject for this. It could be something like my all time favorite Stickies, but anything goes really.

If you think this is a fun thing to do, I will try to arrange for this and maybe even find some sponsors for prices to award.

Bye,
Bart

Delphi's Play Of The Day

Nothing to do with Delphi, but this is my Play Of The Day

Come on guys, don't say you saw this one coming!

Correction: I didn't see it coming. As commented, this is a staged (I won't call it a fake) video. But, IMHO, that makes it twice as funny :-)

Creating an always on top web browser window

For one of the publications in the LearningGuide Manager we needed an 'always on top'-browser window with some information in it. The Learning Guides provide support information to end users. This information needs to stay on top while working on other software.

A normal browser window isn't suitable because you cannot make that always on top. In the past all kinds of hacks and workarounds were available, but tabbed browsing, increased security and the like make it impossible to do something from within the broser (I think ... if you think otherwise, please let me know).

The publications are HTML based and must run on every browser possible. In the past we used OCX-es to implement such features but with the increase in diversity of browsers another solution was needed, since there are only a few (...) browser that support OCX-es.

Here's what we did (I think it's kind of neat). We created a small application that is deployed on the client systems. This application does a lot of things, but also has a TIdHTTPServer which listens at the localhost of the client. It listens for special urls which can do special things.

One the commands is to open an always on top window which has a TWebBrowser component in it and will serve a passed url. E.g. an url like http://localhost/cgi-bin/show?http://www.google.com will popup an always on top window with the google website in it. There's a whole range of commands that can do special things - one's only limited to the imagination of the day.

Of course there are some measures to prevent abuse of this method (which I won't disclose here...) and in the end we have a platform and browser indepent solution to do all kinds of special things next to simply serve HTML files to the end user.

Bye,
Bart