Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by therealmarv 3207 days ago
Borland Delphi was the modern MS Access clone. Ever have seen how fast you can build an DB app with that? I'm sure the newest version of Delphi is still as good today as the 2001/2003 version at that time ;) On Mac it is Filemaker or not?
4 comments

Pricing killed Borland/Delphi. Unattainable to regular developers and small businesses.
Agreed. They finally have an "express" version but even that was $199. I'm sorry but I'm not going to pay that much money for something that I may never even use, especially for a stripped down version of it.
What about Lazarus?
The advent of VB (and ultimately .NET) obsoleted the advantages. In modern .NET (and VB since 1998), you can pull a DataGrid onto the canvas, configure the DB parameters in the IDE and are basically done for an intranet data entry UI.
Filemaker has many issues: It's not an RDB, it's SQL support is limited to poor, and it's scripting is not nearly as versatile as Access.
Delphi was more of a VB competitor, Borland did have a database product called Paradox which was closer to Access.