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Feature Presentation for the April general meeting
Bill Marchant - Visual Programming using Delphi
General Information
A word of thanks to guest speakers
Newsletter Information
Meeting Schedule for the year
The introduction topics will be Bill
Marchant on an item of interest on Windows and Rob MacCara who
will look after the Q&A secession.
The featured presentation by Bill Marchant on Visual programming
using Delphi ( see article in news letter)
The HAPCC general meeting is on 4th Sunday of each month. The
next general meeting will be Apr 25th meeting time 7:00 - 9:00
pm. For this month we have official approval to use the
classroom facilities at CFB Halifax (Stad) for our regular
meetings. New Place! Building S-37 room B18.
Go in the main gates of Stad on Gottigen street and either
stop and ask the fellow in the gate house for directions or:
Proceed straight through the gates and down the little hill and
keep going straight till you come to a stop sign. Go past the
stop sign and down the little hill and turn right at the bottom
of the hill. The long building facing the soccer field is
Numbered S-37 and the sign out front says that it is the home of
the Naval Engineering School. You've reached the right place.
Find a parking spot and go in the first doors you come to (North
doors where the sign is Go Straight in the building and down the
stairs to the next level and turn left. The classroom we'll be
using is B18 and it's right down at the end on the left hand side
of the corridor. Notice that you'll be passing a washroom on your
right as you look for B18. The new facilities boast a room with
25 computers as well as a projection system that we can use. See
you all there on the 28th!
In this issue
This article is an advertisement for the demonstration I hope to provide at the 25 April meeting of
HAPCC. I will run through the development of a simple data base, and show how quickly
DEPLHI can provide a working program. I will also demonstrate the features of some of the add-
on tool boxes, and explain other programming features as time permits.
\Many computer users will have heard about Visual Basic. An early version of BASIC is the
program generation system which was included in ROM on the original IBM PC. Many amateur
programmers learned to use it, and a great deal of the shareware programs a few years ago were
programmed using BASIC. Visual Basic is the latest Microsoft incarnation of this old and venerable programming
language.
While BASIC was the choice of many amateur programmers, basically (no pun intended) because
it was free, another language PASCAL was being used in the universities as a language for
teaching programming to Computer Science students. PASCAL was a language which demanded a
certain amount of discipline with respect to the structure of programs. It was referred to as being
highly structured. All variables, for example had to be declared and properly defined before they
could be used in a program. This was thought to be good for students. The "C" language was also
used in universities, and became the language used by Microsoft for developing WINDOWS.
Borland International, (now called INPRISE) developed and marketed the first economical
(cheap) version of a PASCAL compiler. It cost less than $20, and was so good that it almost
immediately displaced PASCAL compilers costing several hundred dollars. In the course of time,
the Borland version of PASCAL became so popular that it became the defacto standard of all
PASCAL; Borland, almost by default controlled the language.
When Object Oriented Programming became popular, and Borland adapted PASCAL to this
system. At a later date, Object Oriented 'C' compilers were developed. This caused some
problems because 'C' had an agreed standard to adhere to, and changes had to be made in
agreement with a committee. The result was C++. Borland did not have these restrictions with
PASCAL.
When Visual Programming was discovered, Borland was not first, but when a form of Visual
Pascal called DELPHI was finally announced, it took the programming world by storm. DELPHI
began to be used by professional programmers much more widely than heretofore. DELPHI
supported database systems using dBASE and Paradox and several other formats. It was now
possible with a few hours work to produce sophisticated data base programs to take the place of
dBASE and Paradox applications which formerly could be run only in the presence of their
interpreter programs.
It may surprise a lot of people to be told that the Delphi development system was written in
Delphi. How is this possible? The basic elements of the system are laid out in such a way that the
components of the system can be written by the system. This capability is the principle dividend
of the Object Oriented approach to programming. It means that if an existing component requires a
feature that does not currently exist, the new feature can be added without having to re-write the
entire code for the component. New components are being added all the time. Each new version
of DELPHI (we are now in DELPHI 4) is an enlargement of the previous version. This ease of developing new and
altered components has spawned a huge after market business for enterprising
programmers. Third party components are plentiful. Half a dozen major companies provide tool
boxes of components for specialized purposes. There is a wide variety of freeware and shareware
component packages available. There are financial management packages, Oracle database
connection packages, Internet connection packages and many more. INPRISE itself provides
packages for programming the IBM AS400 system. DELPHI is now used widely for client-server
applications, where many different systems are used. Nova Scotia residents may be interested to
know that their phone bills are generated with a data base program developed using DELPHI.
Going back to the interchangeability between Visual C++ and DELPHI, many of the third party
suppliers write their packages in DELPHI, and port them to C++. When you buy one of these
packages you are asked at installation whether you are using DELPHI or C++, and the package
installs according to your needs.
RAD, stands for Rapid Application Development. My own experience with systems other than
DELPHI is nil, so I cannot comment on the utility of anything but DELPHI. Whenever the question
comes up, I have to ask why I would want anything else. The answer is I don't. The only catch for
an amateur like me is the cost. The top line Enterprise version of DELPHI costs several thousand
dollars. I have been updating the Professional version for several years, so my costs are relatively
low, but still, I have quite a few hundreds invested in software. Visual programming has changed
forever the way programs are developed. Anyone who makes a living programming cannot afford
to do the work any other way.
Didn't anyone ever tell you that Beta is Latin for "it doesn't work yet?"
Chairperson David Potter
Vice-Chair Bill Marchant
Treasurer Rob MacCara
Web Librarian Thayne MacLean
Newsletter Editor Diane Smith
Membership Promotion Pat Conen
and the following members who assist in planning our monthly
meetings: Norman DeForest, Henry Hill, Ken Gilmour,and Colin Stuart.
The HAPCC has two kinds of
meetings. Firstly the regular Sunday night meeting which most
members attend regularly, secondly the monthly (approximately)
planning meeting which organizes the business of the Club,
including what happens on the Sundays. The planning meeting is
held on Monday, a week after the regular meeting in which all
members of the Club are urged to attend. At the planning meeting,
we discuss feature speakers for regular meetings, finances,
membership, training, and other computer related subjects.
....Bill Marchant
A word of thanks to guest speakers and the their web suites.
Our guest speaker at the March meeting was
Mr. David Baxter, Product Specialist at MT&T for the
MpoweredPc service. His multi-media presentation showed us how
far the service has come, and in which direction it is heading.
MpoweredPc was being officially launched on April 7, 1998 and it
promises to be a serious contender in the high-speed
internet/software on demand arena. More info can be found here:
Mpowered.
Once again, thank you to MT&T and David Baxter.
Our guest speaker in February, 1998 was Sgt. Bill
Cowper, Internet Communications Officer of the Halifax Regional
Municipality Police Department. He gave a history of how and when
the police department started using the Internet. They were the
first police department in Canada to be on the Internet. Sgt.
Cowper is continually receiving calls from all over the world
looking for assistance. The presentation showed how well the
department and the officers in the patrol cars are versed on
getting the criminals off the streets. If you would like to
check-out their web site the address is:
Halifax
Regional Police Service gives an
idea of what an "Internet Cybercop" is all about.
In this issue
Newsletter Articles.... We are almost
always in need of good articles. If anyone has something that
they feel would make a good article, an interesting story to
tell, or even a good meeting topic, please don't hesitate to pass
it on. Articles can be submitted in almost any format, ASCII
text, AMI Pro, MS Word, Windows Write, WordStar and of course
WordPerfect.
The news letter is mailed to all paid up members and to anyone who has attended a meeting within
the past three months. Yearly membership dues are $15.00.
Club Mailing Address -
P.O. Box 29008, Halifax N.S., B3L 4T8.
In this issue
We decide the meeting dates for the
upcoming year at the last planning meeting of the season. The
dates for these are listed below. As in previous years, the
December meeting is moved to the early part of January due to
Christmas Eve being near the fourth Sunday of the month.
The planning meetings are normally held on the second Monday (8
days) after the general meeting. They are currently held at a
members home and the address is announced at the meeting prior to
the planning meeting. Anyone is welcome to assist in the planning
of future meetings or events.
Meeting dates for the 1999 season:
Apr-25 May-24 June-27
Any changes to the scheduled dates will be announced where possible at the regular monthly meetings and/or in this newsletter.
