>My current client is seriously thinking of porting his commercial VFP app to Delphi because of the speed of instantiation of the forms ie VFP is too slow on many of the PCs being used Pentiums with 64MB RAM.
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>He accepts that VFP data engine is fast - but this app is not partic data intensive.
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>Has anyone had any experience of how much faster Delphi form instantiation is than VFP - and what the disadvantages of Delphi are. (Apart from fact that I am a complete novice with Delphi !)


Hi Anna,

I think you have already got some pretty good suggestions for improving form speed. One to pay particular close attention to is a VFP form with a multiple page pageframe where each page has lots of controls. There is a well documented trick to defeating this problem, and has to do with dropping the controls on all of the non initially displayed pages into contrainers, and only creating the container objects on the page when the page activates. This greatly improves form load times, if you have a form such as this.

On the more high level topic of Delphi, it is a pretty good product. The language, Object Pascal, is a "true" OO language (if this is important to you) and is pretty easy to pick up. I built a fairly complex Win32 app in about 2 months, having never used Delphi before. It also has all of the normal RAD tools (form builder, menu builder, class builder, etc..). It can build DLLs, but even nicer is the fact that the EXE's you build are truly compiled. No runtime libraries when distributing your app, only any external ActveX controls and the like you may have used.

The internal set of controls that ship with in Delphi is quite rich. The BDE (Borland Database Engine) is certainly not as flexible as VFP's native data handling. Overall Delphi is very comparable to VB. In my opinion Delphi is a slightly nicer tool than VB out of the box. I found I could do more, more quickly, than when I was picking up VB. Just a personal observation.