What is the “current” Delphi web app framework?

Question

I'm looking at Delphi web server apps, and the first thing I notice when I go into the New Items dialog is that there are several different frameworks.

WebBroker looks the nicest from a conceptual standpoint, but in the documentation it looks like its DB and session-management code is tied to the BDE, which makes it somewhat less than useful today.

WebSnap looks very similar, but the documentation says it's deprecated and IW ("VCL for the Web") should be used instead.

So I look at IW, and I can't make heads or tails of how it's supposed to work. The sample code is full of stuff that looks like it belongs in a desktop app, like clicking a button to fire an event handler to change the caption of a form element. (Wouldn't that have to be done client-side in JavaScript if we're creating a webpage?)

So what's the current standard framework for building a web server in Delphi?

+1 very good question, if I remember correctly, IW automatically converts delphi code to javascript and adds it to the <head> section of the html, however, I would strongly recommend taking a different approach, maybe using IdHTTPServer(not sure how scalable it is yet...) and maybe DWScript as your server side scripting language? I've used this approach many times and it works very good. To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, take a look at a very old blog post delphigeist.com/2010/12/… — user497849
Interesting, but that example only works for serving up pages. What happens when you need to take data from the user and process it? — Mason Wheeler
on GET/POST request you process data, connect to database(if required) and all that good stuff. if you need to for example process data for table users, you can have a page called users.html and code in that unit will be responsable for insert/update/delete/retrieval/etc. in that post I haven't added this as example, but it shouldn't take you long before you start defining functions in DWScript that will establish db connection and class that will help you run queries. — user497849
So, if you define a custom class called TQuery which has Execute|ExecSQL and Open methods and some way of retrieving field values and iterate through rows and such, you can also make it "db independent", if that's too much work(I estimate about 7-8h with testing) then you should look at a different alternative web2py, ror, django, etc. but the late ones have a pretty long learning curve... my idea is simple, you write delphi code all the way! — user497849
P.S. users.html is the page to/from which the browser posts/requests data, that's DWScript code, no html. — user497849

LachlanG LachlanG · Accepted Answer · 2012-02-08T01:19:59

While there are several commercial options available for writing web apps with Delphi, in my opinion Delphi no longer ships with a modern web development solution included as part of the package.

If I had to give an answer to your question though I would say that the current out of the box Delphi web framework is WebBroker. WebBroker is the only web framework included with Delphi that isn't deprecated or restricted in its functionality.

WebBroker was introduced perhaps as far back as Delphi 4. It's a good honest work horse but it hasn't really been improved much since it was first introduced. It leaves you to do most of the heavy lifting but it also doesn't get in your way. WebSnap and IntraWeb were built using WebBroker as their foundation which gives you idea of the level of services it provides.

A full version of IntraWeb has been bundled with Delphi Enterprise for many years but as of Delphi XE it now has several limitations (no SSL, no ISAPI deployment, 20 minute idle timeout) that will very likely mean you'll need to buy a license from AtoZed to use it seriously.

The version of IntraWeb bundled with Delphi Pro has always been far too limited to be considered anything other than an evaluation version.

What is the “current” Delphi web app framework?

4 Answers