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Realistic Developer Tool Comparison Methodology and Metrics (Part 1)

Realistic Developer Tool Comparison Methodology and Metrics

Today’s proliferation of tools to enhance software development is a cause for celebration. Many amazing people work daily to build and distribute utilities, plug-ins, and IDEs that make our development easier!  However, the other side of the proliferation coin describes a constant struggle to identify the best tool for both the current job and for your future. If you’ve ever been faced with eight frameworks competing for your attention in the same software domain and felt choice paralysis, you understand how difficult it can be to make that significant personal and business choice. With this in mind, we’re embarking on a mission to publish a series of white papers that compare and contrast RAD Studio with other major frameworks for application development to root out the best long-term choice.  Our audience is both developers who must intimately understand their tool of choice and also decision-makers and business strategists seeking a framework that will support on-time delivery, future expansion, and long-term stability.

Methodology

Five benchmark applications will be used to compare selected frameworks

Each application incorporates basic functions fulfilled by a good framework like UI design, REST API communication, Unicode support, database support, etc. These applications will be developed by experts in the selected frameworks (volunteer for Delphi and contracted for other frameworks) and evaluated according to the main project metrics.

Metrics

These papers will assess frameworks in the areas of developer productivity, framework functionality, tool flexibility, and runtime performance.  

Project Roadmap

Embarcadero plans this project as an iterative comparison between RAD Studio, Delphi, and C++Builder with other frameworks, with the goal of spurring conversation with other framework developers. All the research and data will be published on GitHub, for others to review. The first comparison is between RAD Studio’s Visual Component Library (VCL) and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) .NET using the Calculator benchmark application. Following that, RAD Studio’s FireMonkey multi-application framework will be tested against Electron. Expect future iterations to continue to work through the aforementioned benchmark projects, incorporate new frameworks, and build on these initial papers to provide a comprehensive comparison of 2020’s leading development tools.

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