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- <TITLE>A few thoughts related to Demo Applications</TITLE>
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- The entire purpose of a demo application is to show the functionality of a specific product.
- In Delphi you will find that most of the Demo applications will be related in one way or another
- to a Component, Unit, or some sort of IDE enhancement. It seems that for some strange reason the
- word Demo has also come to have the (unstated) meaning of being less useful then the product itself.
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- When I first started working with Delphi (back in `94 in case your curious) I was hard pressed to
- find anything other then some obscure references to Pascal that while they were close were not
- completely useful. This bothered me so much that I actually spent more time creating an Examples
- Folder for myself to reference (In case your curious currently that same folder upgraded over the
- years has over 400 projects in it). Every time I set out to write an example I took a different
- mindset then others (though I didn't know it at the time). Instead of writing down something that
- just showed me the basic idea of what I wanted to do I took it to the fullest extent. Instead of
- just writing an example of how to drag an item from one list box to another (back then you couldn't
- reliably perform it to the OS) I wrote a simple system explorer. Later I upgraded it when Win32 and
- Delphi 2 came out to be a complete replacement for Windows Explorer. At one point in time I even set
- out to create a spot on my website to display all of these examples and make them readily available
- to the public. Well I never completed that one. It still has some useful code in it so it still
- exists (you guessed were).
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- If your still reading this then I'm sure that you are asking yourself why am I rambling on about my
- hard drive and how I've managed to keep sections of it around for almost 9 years? Well the best
- answer that I can give you is this. It is my feeling that a Demo or an Example application does not
- have to be rudimentary and/or useless to convey a point and to aid those still learning a language.
- Seldom have I had people download any of my Demo applications (beginner or advanced user) and write
- me to say that they couldn't understand the code in the application itself. If they did I always
- took the time to explain it the best that I could. I have on the other hand received latterly
- 100's of emails and possibly 1000's regarding my "Demo" and "Example" applications being used in
- every day application because after viewing them a company decided that they were much more then
- sample code to be looked at.
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- Keep this in mind as you look thru the applications designed by Indy. They are one of the few
- organizations that maintains a set of standards (thou not posted to the world) that tries to keep
- their Demos and the Code as useful to the Developer writing their first TCP/IP application to the
- level of the Business looking for a good FTP client that won't cost them an arm and a leg and yet
- can be modified easily and understood easily by their own developers.
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- I now step down from my soapbox and leave you to that witch I have written.
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- Sincerely,<br>
- <a href="mailto:[email protected]">Jeremy Darling</a><br>
- Owner/Developer Eon Clash<br>
- <a href="http://www.eonclash.com">http://www.eonclash.com</a>
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