Is Lazarus good choice?

[George]

Thanks JD for links to report generators and comments. iReport looks excellent. I will test both soon. At first sight LazReport seems to be for only simple applications, but this may be only illusion. The native VFP report generator also seemd to have serious limitations, especially in version of VFP prior to 9.0, but for many goals it was sufficiently equiped. In sum I shouldn't be dissapointed choosing Lazarus+Firebird (Zeos library) + LazReport or other you pointed out.

[JD]

Thanks JD for links to report generators and comments. iReport looks excellent. I will test both soon. At first sight LazReport seems to be for only simple applications, but this may be only illusion. The native VFP report generator also seemd to have serious limitations, especially in version of VFP prior to 9.0, but for many goals it was sufficiently equiped. In sum I shouldn't be dissapointed choosing Lazarus+Firebird (Zeos library) + LazReport or other you pointed out.

You're welcome. iReport is certainly worth exploring. Documentation is sparse but given its feature set, it is worth a try.

[mas steindorff]

One more thing to think about is the debugging capabilities.  I had not worked in pascal for a few years but when I returned I chose Lazarus as my replacement for Delphi.  I quickly found the watch window and other debug windows are weak when it comes to debugging objects and backtracking exceptions when compared to the way I used Delphi 7.

[JD]

One more thing to think about is the debugging capabilities.  I had not worked in pascal for a few years but when I returned I chose Lazarus as my replacement for Delphi.  I quickly found the watch window and other debug windows are weak when it comes to debugging objects and backtracking exceptions when compared to the way I used Delphi 7.

I agree with you there. Lazarus is a work in progress. But it will get better as more & more people use it. User adoption is the major driver of quality.

[Wodzu]

Good point there. Delphi debugger is superior to the one used by the FPC but this is caused by the factor that there is no native native debugger for FPC.

Creation of native debugger has been discussed since years but this is very hard task. However there are some brave single people who are trying to do this... 

Personally I really doubnt that it achives the state of the one beeing in Delphi 

[newman]

you should develop a test program that implements some of the critical operations in your application. That way you also get a feel of the IDE, the debugger etc.