Re: RichView & Object Pascal

Author

Message

Huub

Posted: 06/03/2002 15:14:54

Atul,

We have been using WPTools quite extensively (almost full time) for almost a

year now and recently we have come up to the point to abandon it. Out

experience are similar to the other replies. We even have the source to the

RTF-engine and I really got scared by looking at it. An application

architecture seems to be missing at least partially which is reflected by

the many inconsistent ways of doing the same thing. There are a lot of

observations which we will send to Julian expressing our disappointment in

the WPTools. I think there is way to get around with WPTools if you simply

use it as it is. Don't try to control if from your application, or if you

must, do it in a very limited ways only. For us we needed to control the

content in the editor almost up to character level or at least up to

fragments. WPTools behaved like a wild horse which was impossible to tame

(ghost cursor movements when changing styles, poor handling of styles,

difficult to find named locations in the editor, etc.). Believe me, we even

hacked the RTF-engine to be able to do what we wanted but in the end we had

to give up. If you add to this our need for good table handling and the way

tables are implemented in WPTools (version 4 is an improvement though) then

there is only one conclusion: "do not use it for these kind of

applications".

Just last friday we started investigating TRichView and TRichViewEdit and I

must say I am quite impressed. The architecture is clean and looks very

solid. The idea if items that you manipulate and find them back easily

within the editor is exactly what we were looking for. Implementing fields

and field handling was a breeze. Table handling is exceptionally good and

the ways styles are implemented (you have both character and paragraph

styles) is excellent. Image insertion is easily and we found TRichView(Edit)

very fast (much faster then WPTools). Spending friday, and a couple of hours

in the weekend we have rewritten our application for almost 40% now. Of

course you can always do it faster the second time, but to give you an idea

the same thing took us almost 3 weeks in WPTools. From what we have seen now

we could have built our application in 3 to 4 months instead of the 11

months it took us now (and still not finished).

We are so confident that our order to Sergey for TRichView(Edit) is in the

make just now.

I hope our experience gives you an idea what you are comparing, but in the

meantime we will work at a programmer to programmer comparison between

TRichView(Edit), WPTools and TextControl. I you like I can send this info to

you when it is finished (somewhere next week).

Rgds,

Huub

"Atul Vaidya" <a.vaidya@attbi.com> wrote in message

news:3ce86609$1@support.torry.net...

> Perhaps some current user of RichView could comment on how good the

> underlying codebase is. I am currently working on a large project where

the

> text processing is being done with WPTools. I bought the component

> originally because superficially it appears quite impressive. However,

now

> that I have used it for a while and seen his source code I am positively

> apalled at the way it has been coded - 700 line 'methods', a complete

> incomprehension of Delphi exception handling usage, failure to understand

> the difference between a while loop & a for loop to mention just a few

> things.

> Superficially, RichView appears to be just as good if not better in terms

> the functionality it offers. But what is it like under its skin?