App Builder & Blazor

[Steve Maughan 22]

Blazor is an interesting technology: web development using C#, compiling to WebAssembly. There’s also App Builder that can do create Blazor GUIs in a RAD style environment. 
 

Does anyone know of any plans to do something similar with Delphi? It seems this would be in the original spirit of Delphi i.e. RAD development compiling to native executable. I know there are things like TMS WebCore, but they compile to JavaScript, whereas WASM would (I assume) be significantly faster. 
 

Thoughts?

 

— Steve

[Kas Ob. 91]

16 hours ago, Steve Maughan said:

Thoughts?

FreePascal capable of producing WASM files.

https://wiki.freepascal.org/WebAssembly

https://www.freepascal.org/~michael/pas2js-demos/wasienv/canvas/

https://www.freepascal.org/~michael/pas2js-demos/wasienv/canvas/canvasdraw.lpr

 

[Lars Fosdal 1732]

Why not stay with C# if you want to do Blazor?

That is where the tooling is, and the language is not that different from Delphi. 

[Steve Maughan 22]

4 hours ago, Lars Fosdal said:

Why not stay with C# if you want to do Blazor?

That is where the tooling is, and the language is not that different from Delphi. 

Hi Lars — I don’t have specific project need. This post was more of a desire for Embarcadero to move in this direction. 

[Lars Fosdal 1732]

Well, my "you" was the general "anyone". And the argument stands: why would anyone chose not to use the massive tooling that already exists for Blazor? Embt would end up in another trying to catch up situation like they did with .net.

[Cristian Peța 94]

There was a survey that closed on 21 January. In the survey was a question also about WebAssembly.

[Steve Maughan 22]

On 1/28/2024 at 10:36 AM, Lars Fosdal said:

Well, my "you" was the general "anyone". And the argument stands: why would anyone chose not to use the massive tooling that already exists for Blazor? Embt would end up in another trying to catch up situation like they did with .net.

Hi Lars,

 

You may be right but I find parallel with the current situation with Blazor and 1994 with VB 3. When Delphi was launched VB had first-mover advantage in the RAD development market. There were lots of ActiveX components. Then Delphi came along and provided a cleaner way to develop and the executables were lightning fast. Now we have Blazor and all of the .net luggage that needs to be installed. To me Blazor seems cluncky in the same way VB was clunky back in 1994. I see a sizable gap in the market for Blazor challenger. The key components would be a page-builder (like the ones for WordPress), the ability to drop controls on GUI and change properties, and then create events and code in Delphi / Visual Pascal. If the whole app was then compiled to WASM and run on any browser that would be wonderful. But you might be right, it might be too much for Embarcadero to pull off.

 

Steve   

[Steve Maughan 22]

10 hours ago, Cristian Peța said:

There was a survey that closed on 21 January. In the survey was a question also about WebAssembly.

That gives me hope