Turbo Power - SongBeamer or SourceForge for Delphi XE?

Question

It looks like the SongBeamer site, which hosts some good ports for OpenSource projects for TurboPower for Delphi 2009+, is now out of date with recent updates to SourceForge. But then again, maybe not? Which versions are best to use with Delphi XE?

I'm most interested in Abbrevia, LockBox and Async Pro. Does this look like Abbrevia-SourceForge, AsynPro-SongBeamer, LockBox ..?

Answer 1

The acronym is much better at SourceForge. The SongBeamer version has been based on unstable code since mid-2008. I started supporting the project in 2009, and the official stable release 3.05 had many corrections and corrections after that. v4.0 was released in March 2011 and added new features, including full support for Unicode file names in zips, bzip2 archives and decompression support for most new zipx compression algorithms (LZMA, bzip2, PPMd, WavPack). The current Suba Subversion also supports Zip64 and much better support split / scroll.

Async Pro looks better on SourceForge, but it's a bit confusing. Officially, only a few components have been upgraded to Unicode. In the SourceForge release, the administrator added $ IFDEF to save the rest of the files from compilation, and on SongBeamer they can still compile, but they may be incorrect. Since the release of SourceForge 5.0, several releases have been released on SongBeamer, so there may be some fixes in the official version, but they are not based on the 5.0 release, so they both went missing.

LockBox 2 is better on SongBeamer. SourceForge has not been updated with Unicode support. The SourceForge website includes a LockBox 3 project that supports Delphi 2007 through Delphi XE, but this is brand new, incompatible code, so the only thing they share is the name. It is updated though, unlike LB2.

Orpheus is better at SourceForge and includes all fixes from SongBeamer.

The office partner has a Unicode update posted on the SourceForge project forums, but does not have an maintainer, so it is not published officially or in the SVN repository. Not available in SongBeamer.

OnGuard and SysTools are the same on both sites.

ShellShock supports Unicode in the SourceForge Subversion repository.

The XML partner has SongBeamer code passed to the SourceForge Subversion repository.

TP basics are better on SongBeamer.

Other TurboPower projects SourceForge projects are dead.

Answer 2

I am the "owner" of Turbopower projects at SourceForge. All of them are in different states of development, but the most popular of them are XE.

I admit that I do not know the exact status of any particular project, but I can say that SourceForge is the best place to get the latest and updated “official” version.

Answer 3

As far as I know, SourceForge project versions are currently actively maintained under the leadership of Nick Hodges.

Answer 4

Stay away from LockBox. Version 2.x is now really outdated (but for very simple cryptography needs), while the developer of version 3.x somehow “stole” the LockBox name by writing another library that is incompatible and its quality does not look very good . Moreover, IMHO he does not have the right to change the license, only the initial developer - Turbo Power - can republish himself under different ones, if he did not like MPL 1.1, he could create his own library without taking the name Turbo Power Lockbox and Sourceforge. Thus, you can use the library with an invalid license, especially if you plan to use it in accordance with the terms of the GPL. If you have a need for good cryptography, look elsewhere.

Answer 5

The original version of AsyncPro also does not add BCB components - it looks like they have suffered a lot since TP opensourced. I had to create packages several times to support different versions of RAD studios. Did not check the latest version of songbeamer.