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A lot of people ask me where the name Deltics comes from, or what it means.  It looks like it might be connected to Delphi, but it isn’t (although that seeming affinity is one of the reasons I chose it).

The original inspiration comes from an early Chris Rea album of the same name which has long been a personal favourite.

The name of that album in turn stems from Chris Rea’s interest in railway locomotives, as “Deltics” became the name by which certain diesel engined locomotives were known.  In fact, that name was itself derived from the engine in those locomotives.

The Napier Deltic.

Having recently arrived in New Zealand the Napier name immediately struck a chord, as this is also the name of a city here.

I liked the name, noticed the fairly obvious similarity to “Delphi”, and in the absence of any better ideas decided to go with it.

9 thoughts on “About Deltics”

  1. When are you going to do another blog entry on Lazarus, they just released 1.0.4 recently. Works pretty well for me and I have already converted or did new projects with it and had very little issues.

  2. Interested in this – I’m just considering whether to dump Delphi completely due to this Pro Client Server issue, which I’ve just found out about and am stunned by.
    What sort of things are you missing when using Lazarus?

  3. Not missing a whole lot except for 3rd party controls
    Like dev express. It really depends on how dependent
    You are on the 3rd party stuff that’s not available.
    I was surprised at the number of libs and controls that have
    Been ported such as Synapse. Check out the lazarus wiki for
    More info tons of good stuff there.

  4. I’m looking for a working example of how to publish a http server over bonjour. Is this something you could share with the world?

  5. Microsoft has recently put online beta of Project Centennial which would enable developing UWP applications in Ada, Delphi or whatever native languages developers favor. It currently requires Windows 10 Insider Preview Enterprise or Pro (I don’t have one), and Centennial applications would probably also require features only present in Insider Preview editions, but this is something we can get hands on. Microsoft promises to roll next Windows 10 version this year with these features included. You can probably write about Project Centennial.

    1. Project Centennial does not enable developing UWP aplications. It enables delivering non-UWP applications through the Windows Store. But non-UWP applications – by force of circumstance – already have distribution channels and don’t need store deployment. Centennial is a belated and misguided attempt to elevate the perceived utility of the Windows Store, nothing more.

      1. IIUC Project Centennial (PC) applications gain access to the full Windows Runtime APIs. The are being assigned identity, and so can send notifications and accept micropayments. Previously interacting with Metro required awful hacks (look for “Live Tile Support for Metropolis”), and now there is no more need for them. User just installs application from Store and gets live tiles and other stuff. So in many ways applications become universal ones.

        They also have access to WinRT-specific graphics. Personally, I am more interested in UIKit (that is, combining Centennial and Islandwood) because of how much times Objective-C stuff was reimplemented (OPENSTEP/YellowBox/Cocoa, GNUStep, Cocotron, Apple Application Support in Safari/iTunes, Islandwood, AppCelerator), making it more appealing than vendor-locking vanilla WinRT XAML and so on.

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