Posted by Jen Wu on Sep 29, 2003; 5:12pm
URL: https://forum.world.st/How-does-Dolphin-compare-to-Access-and-Delphi-tp3368794p3368803.html

Thanks for replying!

I guess what I'm looking for is a commercial alternative to Squeak
(that would be more polished), and thought Dolphin might fit the bill.
 Squeak is great but is incomplete in some ways, and I'm not sure how
end-users would respond to the interface. Aside from that, printing is
one of the main concerns I have with Squeak and was hoping that
commercial Smalltalks might have better solutions. It sounds like
printing is a little of a challenge here, too, though ... although
there are some solutions that people have come up with.

"Bill Schwab" <[hidden email]> wrote in message news:<[hidden email]>...
> You can search the archives of this group for some discussion of reporting.
> I generally just roll my own using HTML.

I've searched through the archives and read a bunch of threads,
including one you started about printing through Internet Explorer.
Did you solve the header/footer problem you mentioned? I've seen other
people mention the problem of pagination with using IE, so it sounded
like a less than ideal situation.

I've also thought about using COM Automation to get Word to generate
reports, but this could be problematic for a number of reasons, not
the least of which are the different versions of Word that are out
there.

I saw also that someone mentioned using FOP from the Apache XML
Project. This sounds interesting ... I'd love to hear if anyone has
had any success with this.

In the meantime, the two most promising solutions sound like Crystal
or RTF.

About RTF -- someone mentioned that they've used this for printing and
previewing, so it sounds interesting. But I looked at Ian's goodie
(http://www.idb.me.uk/goodies3/richtext.html) and it seems like it was
written for Dolphin 3 and hasn't been updated in three years ... is
this an issue?  Also, it looks like licensing makes it so that it
cannot be sold as part of another package. As with other printing
methods, this doesn't lend itself well to users customizing reports.

I've read that people have had problems with Crystal, but Crystal has
the advantage of being pretty common, and also (if the user buys
Crystal Reports) gives the user the ability to potentially edit
reports.  I'm not too concerned with having Crystal support objects
(as others have mentioned), since I think I'd prefer to do reporting
from the database (again so that the user could potentially modify
reports for their custom needs -- unless someone has an alternative?).
 But I'd like to hear more about how people have been using Crystal if
anyone wants to volunteer.

> The support is excellent.  One of the first things you should do is download
> the newsgroup archives from Ian Bartholomew's web site, and then get either
> his news archive reader or DSDN.  Many questions that you will have will
> already be answered, and are quite easy to find, especially by searching on
> one key word and then searching the results for others.

I guess one reason I ask is because I'm subscribed to the squeak
mailing list.  Compared to the traffic on that, the Dolphin newsgroup
is kind of ... well, it seems like there aren't quite as many people
here.  On the other hand, a lot of Squeak messages are about
developing the platform ... I was hoping to use something a little
more ready for production.

> > how big is the development community,
>
> I'll defer to OA on that one.

If anyone would care to speak up about using Dolphin for commercial
software development, I'd love to hear! In particular, user reactions
to software developed with Dolphin.

> It would be interesting to look at five year old trade rags.  We were
> probably all supposed to be writing OLE servers in C++, or was it Java?

Yes, I know, hard to tell what's going to happen in five years ...
maybe a better question is: Where does Dolphin fit in the pantheon of
Smalltalks?  Is it used mostly for commercial software development or
is it used mostly by hobbyists?  If for commercial projects, how
successful has it been in that arena?

Thanks!

Jen