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I have been coding with Delphi for a year now. I do however have much more experience with .NET. I am reading Nick Hodges book 'Coding In Delphi' where he introduces and endorses the Spring 4 Delphi framework.

I was immediately excited about the IEnumerable based generic collections.

My colleagues however have reservations about using the framework. This is mostly to the lack of documentation and some insecurity about Delphi's robustness/stability regarding generics at this level of inheritance.

Therefore the question. What is your experience? Any problems? Are you using the framework in production?

We are currently still on XE2 but expect to switch to XE4 in the next couple of months.

Thank you!

santiagoIT
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    Generics are viable in XE2, better in XE4. Spring4D is superb. You are prepared to use the RTL, but have reservations about Spring4D?!! – David Heffernan Mar 19 '14 at 16:04
  • @DavidHeffernan that is correct. The current state is that RTL Generics are in use, but there is a debate going on about whether to embrace Spring 4D or not. It seems you are using Spring4D ;-), correct? – santiagoIT Mar 19 '14 at 16:12
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    No I am not. I tend to write my own code. ;-). But I know that Spring4D is excellent quality and it's lead author Stefan is superb. I'd take his code over Delphi RTL code every time. – David Heffernan Mar 19 '14 at 16:19
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    The Spring collections are cornerstone in my XE3 code. – Anders E. Andersen Mar 19 '14 at 17:10
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    The lack of "proper" and "official" documentation was also something that somehow made me feel uneasy at first. Getting to know Spring4D through a "third party" book certainly felt weird. After the first few steps, I really regret not using it earlier. Especially the collections have made some stuff easier. – Günther the Beautiful Mar 19 '14 at 18:11
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    @DavidHeffernan Be careful - I might quote you on that some day ;) About the documentation: yes it's still lacking (we improved some xmldoc but it's nowhere near what we like to have it) and a more "how to" documentation is completly missing. Adding that on the bitbucket wiki is our next big task. – Stefan Glienke Mar 19 '14 at 18:25
  • The library MIGHT be good. But as you already stated, it lacks severely because of its documentation which is scattered all over on miscellaneous websites; many pages are just broken (you get: "Wiki Oops, it looks like that file doesn't exist"). I wouldn't drag a huge library into my projects until know I can trust it. – Gabriel Jan 16 '20 at 09:29
  • It is only a little bit worrying that there seems to be one main author. Fortunately, all the code is available. If we could get dcu's only, we wouldn't have used it. In our project we use the collections and the IoC container heavily. I do have the confidence that I and some colleagues could at least maintain our copy (port it to a next Delphi version), should Stefan and his repository vanish of the face of the earth. Documentation is still poor, and that did slow down the adoption of Spring4D in our code base, both in concrete info (how to..), as in trusting the library. – GolezTrol Mar 11 '20 at 21:55

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