Description:
Borland Delphi is to integrated development environments (IDEs) as the Macintosh is to personal computers. Like the Mac, Delphi is technically superior to its competitors in many ways and has a devoted following of users. It isn't as popular as its competitors in terms of raw sales volume, but if you use--or try--Delphi you probably won't care. Delphi is a pleasure to work with, and this Enterprise edition brings its intelligent tools to bear on applications that rely on database access, network communications, or a combination of the two. If you prefer Object Pascal to Visual Basic and want to do serious network, database, and internationalized programming, you'll love Delphi 5 Enterprise. Chief among the attractions of the Enterprise edition on the database-development side is its support for Microsoft SQL Server 7, something that no other version of Delphi includes. You can refer to ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) with Delphi's new ADOExpress object; developers can build database interfaces on top of SQL Server back ends without dealing with ADO directly. There's similar support for InterBase 6.0 (a copy of which ships with Delphi 5 Enterprise) and Oracle 8i. The Enterprise edition also comes with SQL drivers for Oracle, Sybase, Informix, Microsoft, and other database servers, with unlimited permission to distribute them with the applications you create. Borland's Multi-tIer Distributed Application Services (MIDAS) system remains at the heart of Delphi's database development capability, but it's been enhanced with stateless Remote Data Modules (RDMs). RDMs make it easier to create database applications that behave properly in situations in which bandwidth is minimal or unreliable. MIDAS also now has some support for Extensible Markup Language (XML). The Enterprise edition includes a set of tools for XML generation and parsing, so you can dynamically serve XML documents to clients and take XML data as input. There are tools for distributed computing, too, including a debugger that works with remote CORBA and COM resources. Delphi now has better support for development teams (in the form of a to-do list and a Project Browser tool). Internationalization is easier, too: The Translation Suite allows you to isolate different languages' character strings--the German and Gujarati for "Close File," for example--in separate library files. You can write for languages such as Chinese and Korean with double-byte characters, but Unicode support remains poor. The debugger now allows you to define and toggle sets of breakpoints. There's an assortment of bonus goodies in this kit, too: - Borland JBuilder 2, for Java development
- Borland C++ Builder 3, for C/C++ work
- HoTMetaL Pro 5.0, for HTML authoring
- And the Delphi Companion Tools CD, which contains tools from companies other than Borland. Some of them are good (such as the full version of the UnitOOPS Object Linking and Embedding components), but others are just freeware and demo versions of other products you can buy.
Annoyingly, the Delphi 5 installation routine won't check for sufficient disk space before beginning to copy files. If you lack room (the amount required varies according to the options you select), the installation wizard will complete only part of its job before stopping, forcing you to go back and remove the partially installed software before attempting another installation. Borland recommends running Delphi 5 Enterprise on a Pentium 90 with 32 MB of RAM and as little as 80 MB of disk space. Less optimistically, we found a "typical" installation filling more than 200 MB on the disk (250 MB to be safe). Performance on a 500 MHz Pentium III with 256 MB of RAM was solid but hardly blinding; buyers should err toward the higher end, as with any development environment. Make sure you have plenty of disk space available when you set out to install Delphi 5 Enterprise, and you'll be thrilled by the additions to the Delphi development environment. --David Wall
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