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salvadordf / WebView4Delphi

WebView4Delphi is an open source project created by Salvador Díaz Fau to embed Chromium-based browsers in applications made with Delphi or Lazarus/FPC for Windows.
https://www.briskbard.com/forum/
MIT License
280 stars 56 forks source link

Delphi 7 Support #27

Closed Newgap closed 1 year ago

Newgap commented 1 year ago

I was wondering if it would be not too hard to make this project compatible with Delphi 7 ?

salvadordf commented 1 year ago

It might be possible. All the units would have a lot more conditionals and some code changes. It would certainly be a lot work.

Newgap commented 1 year ago

Ok, thanks for your answer

fastbike commented 1 year ago

I was wondering if it would be not too hard to make this project compatible with Delphi 7 ?

Why would you be using a development environment that is 20 years old, given the major advances in the language and tooling since then ? Are you still using insecure Win XP ?

Newgap commented 1 year ago

It would take ages to make sure that all our code is good in the latest version of Delphi. We have about 1.5 million lines of code. On the long run we would like to get rid of Delphi so it is not really interesting to invest heavily in upgrading Delphi. There's a part of our app that use the web for mapping (like Google Maps) and those website are beginning to stop supporting Internet Explorer (the base of the TWebBrowser component). I've looked into CEF4Delphi, but we would need to package Chromium file with our app. It would be preferable IMHO that we use the browser already installed on the workstation. If WebDev4Delphi is not made available for Delphi 7 or that I'm unable to backport it myself, we will most probably use CEF4Delphi.

P.S. no we don't support WinXP anymore.

fastbike commented 1 year ago

OK, your call but I would think moving away from a 1.5M line code base is several magnitudes more involved than upgrading from D7. Modern language features reduce the need to move to another language. Good luck.

P.S. we had a product that used an embedded IE11 control (https://github.com/ghquant/Delphi-EmbeddedWB), but were fortunate enough that our requirements could be met by changing architecture to use a native web page along with browser extensions and a web service API.

Newgap commented 1 year ago

Do you mean like your users would use your app side by side with a browser window?

Thanks for the encouragements and I'm unfortunately not the one who makes the call to upgrades our Delphi environments.

fastbike commented 1 year ago

Do you mean like your users would use your app side by side with a browser window?

Sort of, our app was hosting a third party "web page" in an embedded browser with a whole lot of logic to synchronise with yet another third party desktop app. E.g. we could detect changes in the third party app and synchronise our app for (medical) security reasons.

fastbike commented 1 year ago

I'm unfortunately not the one who makes the call to upgrades our Delphi environments.

Unfortunately some management have no idea of the practicalities involved in moving a software project to a different environment. I'm in the fortunate position of running a small software dev team, with ~30 years of hands on dev experience myself.

salvadordf commented 1 year ago

I added some missing include files and I also modified some conditionals. Still many other things to do...

Newgap commented 1 year ago

Sorry for the delay, but MANY thanks!