As I suspected Delphi Prism is ideal for my purposes. Since I am a hobby linguist, my program is a Hebrew verb conjugation application. I am trying to formulate all necessary rules including all exceptions in Pascal. Last year I implemented a working prototype in Objective-C.

http://web.mac.com/ajbrehm/Home/Software.html

It worked, but wasn't portable; and Cocoa is a bit of a hassle when it comes to string manipulation since it offers no native support for unicode regular expressions. I can re-use the GUI.

This is how I am planning to proceed, slowly, of course, since I am lazy and not exactly super-bright when it comes to programming.

The class tree will be the same as in the Cocoa version. It is described here:

http://web.mac.com/ajbrehm/Home/Blog/Entries/2008/8/24_Conjugator.html

(Is there a way in Delphi Prism to have the IDE create these class diagram thingies?)

The Word and Conjugation classes and Conjugation's subclasses will be implemented in a DLL which can then be used by a GUI-based application. (I am a bit unclear as to whether words, i.e. instances of Word, should be created in the DLL project or each GUI project. I assume this will become obvious once I understand what I am doing.)

I am working on letting the DLL project and a Winforms project grow side by side until the GUI represents everything the DLL can do and then I'll add a Cocoa GUI while working on perfecting the DLL and then finally add a Linux/GTK GUI and a WPF GUI as well to get four versions of the program, just for the heck of it.

Are there any obvious pitfalls I am headed for?

Are you planning to release the source code under some open source license?

It would be interesting to have such a cross-platform and cross-toolkit 
application with source code.

I don't think something like this exists yet, does it?

-- 
Regards
Jens

> {quote:title=Jens Mühlenhoff wrote:}{quote}
> Are you planning to release the source code under some open source license?

Yes.

In fact the source for the Cocoa version is available for download. But it's a dead end because without regular expressions this is difficult to implement and since Cocoa is not portable the entire open source thing doesn't make as much sense as it could.



> It would be interesting to have such a cross-platform and cross-toolkit 
> application with source code.

I had this idea a few months ago (hence the Cocoa prototype) and then discussed it with my Hebrew teacher in Ramat Yishai. My goal is to learn Delphi and study Hebrew grammar at the same time and then make it possible for others to use the program to learn conjugation as well.


 
> I don't think something like this exists yet, does it?

I don't think so. Most such programs have lists of pre-determined verbs. This one will explore the actual rules.

And learning more .NET can never hurt either. :-)

Edited by: Andrew Brehm on Jul 17, 2009 3:03 PM

It's coming along.

I now have a class TConjugation (should I name classes like that?) which contains methods and fields common to all conjugation types. I have a subclass TConjugationPa3al which represents a specific conjugation (there will be more of those). And I have a TWord class which is a word. (Since "Word" is also a built-in type, I use "element" as a variable name instead of "word" to avoid confusing Intellisense.)

When a TWord (word) is created, the word creates a variable "conjugation" of the type TConjugation which at runtime gets initialised as "new TConjugationPa3al". (Can I do this? It seems to work. It's how I did it in Objective-C.)

The whole thing is a DLL and I have a Winforms app as test program. Everything seems to work so far.

Any comments, ideas, criticisms?

Andrew Brehm a écrit :

> The whole thing is a DLL and I have a Winforms app as test program.
> Everything seems to work so far.
> 
> Any comments, ideas, criticisms?

The main thing to remember is to avoid writing any business logic at all 
in your Winforms form classes and to write your own "Controller" classes 
for use with WinForms :-)

Joanna

-- 
Joanna Carter [TeamB|http://www.teamb.com]
Consultant Software Engineer

> {quote:title=Joanna Carter wrote:}{quote}

> 
> The main thing to remember is to avoid writing any business logic at all 
> in your Winforms form classes and to write your own "Controller" classes 
> for use with WinForms :-)
> 

Yes, I am trying that.

I still have to create words in the controller classes, unless I find a way around that. Maybe the controller classes should create a common interface towards another project (or class in the original DLL)?

The DLL currently uses Windows.Forms for message boxes that help me debug stuff. (I don't know how to use the debugger reliably for strings in high unicodes that read from right to left.)

Once everything works and the only bugs left are in the business logic, I'll remove those references.

You MIGHT like using Eco5 for diagramming and maintaining your model.  Checkout CapableObjects.  I think RemObjects also has some sort of modeling, but I don't think it is Model Driven as Eco is.  (I haven't looked at either of them thoroughly, but have looked at Eco5 more).

Also, although there is a learning curve involved and it is not currently supported out of the box by Prism, I would strongly recommend Silverlight 3 rtw instead of WinForms.  Silverlight can run in and out of the browser and can be run in FF, IE plus others and it will run on the Macs (and I believe Linux, but I don't really know).

There are many great "Getting Started" videos on Silverlight at silverlight.net.  These videos are THE WAY to learn stuff nowadays imho.  Most are short and to the point.

I think there are a couple of videos for Eco also.


(I tried to make a hyperlink on the page, but it doesn't seem to work anymore)

> {quote:title=Mark Tiede wrote:}{quote}
> You MIGHT like using Eco5 for diagramming and maintaining your model.  Checkout CapableObjects.  I think RemObjects also has some sort of modeling, but I don't think it is Model Driven as Eco is.  (I haven't looked at either of them thoroughly, but have looked at Eco5 more).
> 
> Also, although there is a learning curve involved and it is not currently supported out of the box by Prism, I would strongly recommend Silverlight 3 rtw instead of WinForms.  Silverlight can run in and out of the browser and can be run in FF, IE plus others and it will run on the Macs (and I believe Linux, but I don't really know).
> 
> There are many great "Getting Started" videos on Silverlight at silverlight.net.  These videos are THE WAY to learn stuff nowadays imho.  Most are short and to the point.
> 
> I think there are a couple of videos for Eco also.
> 
> 

Sounds interesting.

GUIs are easily replaceable. The first GUI will be Winforms simply because it's the easiest and that GUI will also be my main debugging tool.

The Monobjc/Cocoa GUI comes next. I also want to add a Linux (Gtk) GUI. I'll happily add more GUI types.

I am doing this to learn Delphi Prism, GUI toolkits, and Hebrew grammar at the same time. :-)

Silverlight sounds interesting...

(I have a test program in C# that actually determines at runtime whether it is running on Windows or Mac OS X and then builds Cocoa or Winforms windows depending on usefulness. It works but is difficult to maintain.)

Edited by: Andrew Brehm on Jul 21, 2009 3:16 PM

Check out those silverlight videos :-)  It really is easy.  And far more flexible and powerful than WinForms.

Mark Tiede <> wrote:

> Check out those silverlight videos :-)  It really is easy.  And far more
> flexible and powerful than WinForms.

I thought Silverlight was really for browsers, like Flash?

I'll look into those videos tomorrow.

Well, it IS for browsers, but I would say not quite like Flash.  One can make a complete normal UI application without any media which I think is what most people use Flash for.  Silverlight can ALSO do media and all kinds of fancy interfaces including 3d moving forms if you want.  But you don't have to get that fancy.

The standard stuff let's you create menus, popups, textboxes, labels, and the like.  But you can also bind them to data objects properties, etc. etc.

Let me know if you can't find the videos.  If you want to use Silverlight, I can help you get it going with Prism.  You can also get a free trial version of Blend that is good until September and that can help you get the hang of xaml interactively.

Mark Tiede <> wrote:

> Well, it IS for browsers, but I would say not quite like Flash.  One can
> make a complete normal UI application without any media which I think is
> what most people use Flash for.  Silverlight can ALSO do media and all
> kinds of fancy interfaces including 3d moving forms if you want.  But you
> don't have to get that fancy.

I don't think I can deal with graphics. Maths is not my strength. I am a
text guy.

 
> The standard stuff let's you create menus, popups, textboxes, labels, and
> the like.  But you can also bind them to data objects properties, etc.
> etc.

Textboxes sound good. I want textboxes. :-)


> Let me know if you can't find the videos.  If you want to use Silverlight,
> I can help you get it going with Prism. 

Thank you. I will definitely dive into Silverlight as well. I figure I
can try out all GUI toolkits given that my program is mainly a DLL with
a simple GUI.


> You can also get a free trial
> version of Blend that is good until September and that can help you get
> the hang of xaml interactively.

I'll get Blend.