13 ms·

Wikipedia provided this simple description, which would be nice to see on the RC post (but perhaps they assumed the only folks interested in an RC post would be

Wikipedia provided this simple description, which would be nice to see on the RC post (but perhaps they assumed the only folks interested in an RC post would be folks familiar with the tool already): Lazarus is a free cross-platform visual integrated development environment (IDE) for rapid application development (RAD) using the Free Pascal compiler.

tabtab 8y ago
I miss WYSIWYG IDE's like Delphi, VB-classic, and Lazarus. Dealing with HTML "autoflow" and Bootstrap is a royal pain. You sketch a draft GUI that seems a good fit for the application and users, and then realize you have to jump through hoops backward on a unicycle while chewing gum blindfolded to get it right on web browsers. Jetsons WYSIWYG technology yanked from my happy fingers by an LSD "standard". (I'm assuming "office" applications here, not those needing smart-phone UI's.)
- jenkstom 8y ago
  We just need a Lazarus target for webassembly and we'll be good.
  - tabtab 8y ago
    Hmmm, can Lazarus be used to build a "GUI browser"? For example, can one send a "create button" command or tag to it and have it draw one dynamically? What about new panels and forms? How "meta" can its GUI engine be at run-time.
    - lmz 8y ago
      Yes it can do that. That's how the IDE works and displays the GUI designer.
      - tabtab 8y ago
        Can you recommend any documentation on the "meta" angle? Most documentation I find assumes the creation of "static" widgets that are activated or hidden at run-time (or at least act that way).
        lmz 8y ago
        This is for Delphi however it should be very similar for Lazarus: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1005373/creating-components-at-runtime-delphi https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1005373/creating-compone... Nothing magic. Create it, set properties.
        tabtab 8y ago
        Thanks!
    - vram22 8y ago
      Yes, it may be able to. At least, Delphi, the idea (and language) of which Lazarus is based on, was written in itself, at least for v1, I've read. Probably for later versions too, because Object Pascal (although IIRC the language is now called Delphi, like the product), is a powerful general-purpose programming language, with OOP support, module (units) support, and even some sort of generics (IIRC) in later versions.
  - michielr 8y ago
    Pretty sure this is being worked on! If you're really interested I can check with an ex-colleague who is involved in Free Pascal.
- meredydd 8y ago
  Can I interest you in a very Delphi-like IDE for building web apps with nothing but Python? https://anvil.works https://anvil.works has a WYSIWYG visual designer, with Python for in-browser code as well as server-side. (We compile it to JS.) It's even got a built-in DB if you want it (Postgres-backed). Everything in one language, full front-to-back autocompletion...all the things we missed about Delphi!
  - pkphilip 8y ago
    If you released this as a node.js type app which can be run directly on the user's desktop and accessible via the browser for some setup functions and via an editor like VSCode etc for the source code editing, this could be a great product.
  - pkphilip 8y ago
    Nice product but it may have been better to release this as a opensource product because there will always be a fear that if your company goes bottoms-up, those companies who used your platform will be left high and dry.
    - tabtab 8y ago
      That's my fear also. Emulating GUI's in web browsers takes a ship-load of code. Therefore, it needs strong maintenance prospects to safely last into the future.
    - meredydd 8y ago
      The thing is, making Anvil open source now would virtually guarantee that outcome. The market has spent the last few years demonstrating that the sustainable number of large companies whose main product is open source is...One. (Red Hat, if you were wondering.) Even trying to become that kind of company requires a highly speculative VC-fuelled trajectory, which is famous for turning sustainable 100m-scale companies into 1% unicorns and 99% rubble. Even Docker, which utterly transformed its target market, is barely making any revenue ($25m/year on a $1.3bn valuation). All its value is busily being subsumed into Kubernetes, itself a loss-leader from a company (Google) that makes all its money from something else. Anvil-the-company is sustainable, profitable, and growing, and Anvil-the-product is getting better all the time, because we charge for what we produce. We would love to be able to give it away and keep doing that - but basically, we can't.
- akavel 8y ago
  Heeeey, but actually, unicycle is real fun! Sorry for being OT, but I couldn't resist :D it's just that this exercise you mention seems as a seriously fun idea for one of the many unicycle trials competitions :) just I'm not sure if the chewing gum would up the challenge in any way? That said, I wouldn't really compare JS fighting as similar to really fun unicycle tricks ;D Again, sorry for OT :D https://youtu.be/ePWN7Q4-7kI?t=156 https://youtu.be/ePWN7Q4-7kI?t=156 https://youtu.be/VcwnpLv-iJo https://youtu.be/VcwnpLv-iJo
  - tabtab 8y ago
    Sorry, didn't mean to offend unicycle riders and jugglers. It was just an analogy about having to "juggle" (coordinate) many tricky activities at the same time.
    - akavel 8y ago
      Ahhh, ok, thanks a lot for the explanation; I didn't grasp the metaphor!
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  Yeah, me too. They were one of the steps on the pathway of enabling users and blurring the line between user and programmer. Sadly, the industry lost interest in personal computing in favor of turning users into a resource to farm and feed to advertisers.
  - tabtab 8y ago
    Since it's more income to bill for rocket science than bicycle science, there's no incentive for many to simplify UI standards. Right now we are stuck with "rocket science" web-based UI's and JavaScript brain surgery. Don't get me wrong, HTML browsers are fine for most documents and document navigation, but don't scale to real GUI's easily.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
      Since we're talking web and not native, your metaphor works only if your "rocket science" is performed with used swimming pool materials and your "brain surgery" with gardening tools.
      - tabtab 8y ago
        The metaphor was more about complexity than success or quality.
- axaxs 8y ago
  I cut my teeth on VB classic, as I'm sure a lot of folks my age did. I was learning C/C++ concurrently, got through the basics, and of course hurried to GUI programming since that's what I made. It's been 20 something years, but I remember it being something like 31 lines of code to just get an empty window in Windows. With VB it was basically zero effort. I wish WYSIWYG IDEs for both desktop programming AND html (remember frontpage, or hotdog?) would make a comeback in a big way. To this day I shy away from GUI programming because of how tedious it is.
  - tabtab 8y ago
    Re: I [now] shy away from GUI programming because of how tedious it is. It's not really "GUI programming" anymore. It's making HTML/CSS/DOM act like a GUI.
  - janvidar 8y ago
    I also did some VB classic and Delphi back in the day. I later moved on to C++ with Qt. I've not been working on GUI programming much since, but I really enjoyed the Qt experience; good tools and superior documentation. I never liked gtk - much for the same reasons as your Windows GUI C programming; Too verbose for trivial and mundane things.
    - floatboth 8y ago
      It's only verbose if you use C. GTK is very nice with Rust, C++, D, Vala, Python, JS, Haskell, etc.
- nenadst 8y ago
  you could have a look at https://www.tmssoftware.com/site/tmswebcore.asp https://www.tmssoftware.com/site/tmswebcore.asp or https://www.elevatesoft.com/products?category=ewb https://www.elevatesoft.com/products?category=ewb or https://smartmobilestudio.com/ https://smartmobilestudio.com/ All three claim to be a form of "Delphi for the Web"
  - nenadst 8y ago
    and for some Frameworks integrated in Delphi (first two sadly still not available for Lazarus) http://www.unigui.com/explore/what-is-unigui http://www.unigui.com/explore/what-is-unigui https://www.atozed.com/intraweb/ https://www.atozed.com/intraweb/ This one seems to be also available for Lazarus ! http://www.raudus.com/ http://www.raudus.com/ I wrote an old desktop app for medical laboratories in Delphi (started with D2 ...) and am still quite unsure if this would allow me to port at least some part of it for the web in an (cost and time ) efficient and secure way ... Does anybody have some experience really using them ?
- Joeri 8y ago
  WYSIWYG web tools still exist, but they went SaaS. They’re called “low code development platforms”. If you want to play around with one you can download mendix’s modeler for free.
  - tabtab 8y ago
    It's not going to take off like HTML did if one has to depend on "cloud" vendors playing nice or lasting.
- bitwize 8y ago
  Indeed. GUIs should be laid out visually, by hand. Because that's not tedious, and everybody has a display with the exact same size, resolution, and aspect ratio, right? ...Right?
- ksec 8y ago
  HyperCard > VB-Clasic > Delphi... Then that's it. Somehow we stopped there. Our Computing Speed might have grown 1000x but We somehow manage to put in additional 1000x complexity to cancel out. Not only have Software development not gotten any easier, most software are slo lots more resources intensive.
simion314 8y ago
Yeah, it is not a press release, for more info the home page is very informative IMO https://www.lazarus-ide.org https://www.lazarus-ide.org

tabtab 8y ago

I miss WYSIWYG IDE's like Delphi, VB-classic, and Lazarus. Dealing with HTML "autoflow" and Bootstrap is a royal pain. You sketch a draft GUI that seems a good fit for the application and users, and then realize you have to jump through hoops backward on a unicycle while chewing gum blindfolded to get it right on web browsers. Jetsons WYSIWYG technology yanked from my happy fingers by an LSD "standard". (I'm assuming "office" applications here, not those needing smart-phone UI's.)

jenkstom 8y ago
We just need a Lazarus target for webassembly and we'll be good.
- tabtab 8y ago
  Hmmm, can Lazarus be used to build a "GUI browser"? For example, can one send a "create button" command or tag to it and have it draw one dynamically? What about new panels and forms? How "meta" can its GUI engine be at run-time.
  - lmz 8y ago
    Yes it can do that. That's how the IDE works and displays the GUI designer.
    - tabtab 8y ago
      Can you recommend any documentation on the "meta" angle? Most documentation I find assumes the creation of "static" widgets that are activated or hidden at run-time (or at least act that way).
      - lmz 8y ago
        This is for Delphi however it should be very similar for Lazarus: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1005373/creating-components-at-runtime-delphi https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1005373/creating-compone... Nothing magic. Create it, set properties.
        tabtab 8y ago
        Thanks!
  - vram22 8y ago
    Yes, it may be able to. At least, Delphi, the idea (and language) of which Lazarus is based on, was written in itself, at least for v1, I've read. Probably for later versions too, because Object Pascal (although IIRC the language is now called Delphi, like the product), is a powerful general-purpose programming language, with OOP support, module (units) support, and even some sort of generics (IIRC) in later versions.
- michielr 8y ago
  Pretty sure this is being worked on! If you're really interested I can check with an ex-colleague who is involved in Free Pascal.
meredydd 8y ago
Can I interest you in a very Delphi-like IDE for building web apps with nothing but Python? https://anvil.works https://anvil.works has a WYSIWYG visual designer, with Python for in-browser code as well as server-side. (We compile it to JS.) It's even got a built-in DB if you want it (Postgres-backed). Everything in one language, full front-to-back autocompletion...all the things we missed about Delphi!
- pkphilip 8y ago
  If you released this as a node.js type app which can be run directly on the user's desktop and accessible via the browser for some setup functions and via an editor like VSCode etc for the source code editing, this could be a great product.
- pkphilip 8y ago
  Nice product but it may have been better to release this as a opensource product because there will always be a fear that if your company goes bottoms-up, those companies who used your platform will be left high and dry.
  - tabtab 8y ago
    That's my fear also. Emulating GUI's in web browsers takes a ship-load of code. Therefore, it needs strong maintenance prospects to safely last into the future.
  - meredydd 8y ago
    The thing is, making Anvil open source now would virtually guarantee that outcome. The market has spent the last few years demonstrating that the sustainable number of large companies whose main product is open source is...One. (Red Hat, if you were wondering.) Even trying to become that kind of company requires a highly speculative VC-fuelled trajectory, which is famous for turning sustainable 100m-scale companies into 1% unicorns and 99% rubble. Even Docker, which utterly transformed its target market, is barely making any revenue ($25m/year on a $1.3bn valuation). All its value is busily being subsumed into Kubernetes, itself a loss-leader from a company (Google) that makes all its money from something else. Anvil-the-company is sustainable, profitable, and growing, and Anvil-the-product is getting better all the time, because we charge for what we produce. We would love to be able to give it away and keep doing that - but basically, we can't.
akavel 8y ago
Heeeey, but actually, unicycle is real fun! Sorry for being OT, but I couldn't resist :D it's just that this exercise you mention seems as a seriously fun idea for one of the many unicycle trials competitions :) just I'm not sure if the chewing gum would up the challenge in any way? That said, I wouldn't really compare JS fighting as similar to really fun unicycle tricks ;D Again, sorry for OT :D https://youtu.be/ePWN7Q4-7kI?t=156 https://youtu.be/ePWN7Q4-7kI?t=156 https://youtu.be/VcwnpLv-iJo https://youtu.be/VcwnpLv-iJo
- tabtab 8y ago
  Sorry, didn't mean to offend unicycle riders and jugglers. It was just an analogy about having to "juggle" (coordinate) many tricky activities at the same time.
  - akavel 8y ago
    Ahhh, ok, thanks a lot for the explanation; I didn't grasp the metaphor!
AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
Yeah, me too. They were one of the steps on the pathway of enabling users and blurring the line between user and programmer. Sadly, the industry lost interest in personal computing in favor of turning users into a resource to farm and feed to advertisers.
- tabtab 8y ago
  Since it's more income to bill for rocket science than bicycle science, there's no incentive for many to simplify UI standards. Right now we are stuck with "rocket science" web-based UI's and JavaScript brain surgery. Don't get me wrong, HTML browsers are fine for most documents and document navigation, but don't scale to real GUI's easily.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    Since we're talking web and not native, your metaphor works only if your "rocket science" is performed with used swimming pool materials and your "brain surgery" with gardening tools.
    - tabtab 8y ago
      The metaphor was more about complexity than success or quality.
axaxs 8y ago
I cut my teeth on VB classic, as I'm sure a lot of folks my age did. I was learning C/C++ concurrently, got through the basics, and of course hurried to GUI programming since that's what I made. It's been 20 something years, but I remember it being something like 31 lines of code to just get an empty window in Windows. With VB it was basically zero effort. I wish WYSIWYG IDEs for both desktop programming AND html (remember frontpage, or hotdog?) would make a comeback in a big way. To this day I shy away from GUI programming because of how tedious it is.
- tabtab 8y ago
  Re: I [now] shy away from GUI programming because of how tedious it is. It's not really "GUI programming" anymore. It's making HTML/CSS/DOM act like a GUI.
- janvidar 8y ago
  I also did some VB classic and Delphi back in the day. I later moved on to C++ with Qt. I've not been working on GUI programming much since, but I really enjoyed the Qt experience; good tools and superior documentation. I never liked gtk - much for the same reasons as your Windows GUI C programming; Too verbose for trivial and mundane things.
  - floatboth 8y ago
    It's only verbose if you use C. GTK is very nice with Rust, C++, D, Vala, Python, JS, Haskell, etc.
nenadst 8y ago
you could have a look at https://www.tmssoftware.com/site/tmswebcore.asp https://www.tmssoftware.com/site/tmswebcore.asp or https://www.elevatesoft.com/products?category=ewb https://www.elevatesoft.com/products?category=ewb or https://smartmobilestudio.com/ https://smartmobilestudio.com/ All three claim to be a form of "Delphi for the Web"
- nenadst 8y ago
  and for some Frameworks integrated in Delphi (first two sadly still not available for Lazarus) http://www.unigui.com/explore/what-is-unigui http://www.unigui.com/explore/what-is-unigui https://www.atozed.com/intraweb/ https://www.atozed.com/intraweb/ This one seems to be also available for Lazarus ! http://www.raudus.com/ http://www.raudus.com/ I wrote an old desktop app for medical laboratories in Delphi (started with D2 ...) and am still quite unsure if this would allow me to port at least some part of it for the web in an (cost and time ) efficient and secure way ... Does anybody have some experience really using them ?
Joeri 8y ago
WYSIWYG web tools still exist, but they went SaaS. They’re called “low code development platforms”. If you want to play around with one you can download mendix’s modeler for free.
- tabtab 8y ago
  It's not going to take off like HTML did if one has to depend on "cloud" vendors playing nice or lasting.
bitwize 8y ago
Indeed. GUIs should be laid out visually, by hand. Because that's not tedious, and everybody has a display with the exact same size, resolution, and aspect ratio, right? ...Right?
ksec 8y ago
HyperCard > VB-Clasic > Delphi... Then that's it. Somehow we stopped there. Our Computing Speed might have grown 1000x but We somehow manage to put in additional 1000x complexity to cancel out. Not only have Software development not gotten any easier, most software are slo lots more resources intensive.

simion314 8y ago

Yeah, it is not a press release, for more info the home page is very informative IMO https://www.lazarus-ide.org https://www.lazarus-ide.org