Modernizing Industrial Software with Delphi 12

The customer’s goals were achieved in several steps. As always, we began by analyzing the existing Delphi 7 codebase. Our team identified legacy components and documented dependencies. To understand the business logic and specific challenges, we conducted a knowledge transfer. 

Here’s the list of problems we encountered and how we resolved them:

Challenge 1: Outdated Technology and Unicode Compatibility 

The project relied on Delphi 7. That version lacked full Unicode support. The framework used ANSI strings by default, and this created critical limitations for modern global applications. 

Difficulties:

• Upgrading to Delphi 12 required testing to ensure no data corruption during string conversions. 
• TQuery and TTable (BDE components) were deprecated, requiring migration to FireDAC.
• Legacy libraries like Indy 9 or SynZip lacked HTTPS/SSL support.

Solutions:

• Migrated the codebase to Delphi 12, resolving Unicode compatibility issues.
• Migrated BDE database components to FireDAC, ensuring backward compatibility with legacy SQL.
• Migrated from Indy 9 to Indy 10 for TLS 1.2+ compliance and async I/O.

Challenge 2: Platform Limitations 

The legacy app only ran on 32-bit Windows, using outdated Win32 APIs and hardcoded paths (C:\Data\). This prevented deployment on modern Linux cloud servers (AWS/Ubuntu).

Difficulties: 

• Adapting Windows-specific code for Linux platforms.
• Ensuring consistency across 32-bit and 64-bit Windows architectures.
• Path delimiter conflicts (“” vs “/”) and case-sensitive file systems on Linux.

Solution:

• Used Delphi’s FMX framework for cross-platform deployment, which helped enable Linux deployment. 
• Refactored platform-dependent code to work on both Windows and Linux.
• Conducted testing on 32-bit and 64-bit systems, optimizing performance for each.

Challenge 3: Obsolete User Interface

The UI was outdated. It didn’t meet modern usability standards and had complicated user interactions with the application.

Difficulties:

• Balancing aesthetic modernization with the need to retain intuitive workflows. 

Solutions: 

• We designed the new user-friendly UI with improved navigation and visual consistency. But we also saved the core functionality. 

All the goals were successfully achieved. And in December 2024, our client reached out to Softacom again. The company requested an estimate for migrating other Delphi projects to a web-based platform.