Our company has been developing Delphi GIS applications, primarily location referenced road databases for Swiss authorities, for more than seven years. We developed with ESRI MapObjects for a long time before beginning a search in the spring of 2001 for an alternative product to better meet our needs.
Shortly thereafter we discovered the TatukGIS DK and began a period of extensive testing. Even before we paid the first dollar, we learned that the TatukGIS support was great. In the summer of 2001 we made the strategic decision to move our applications to TatukGIS DK primarily because TatukGIS provides the full product source code. The availability of the source code greatly enhances our productivity relative to working in an ActiveX environment (as is the case with MapObjects). Our experience with the ActiveX was that development often involved trial and error procedures, building "workarounds" into our code to bi-bass the ActiveX shortcomings, etc., when the ActiveX did not behave as expected. Switching to the DK eliminated these types of irritations.
Something you do not get with the DK is a huge amount of printed documentation. But you do not need it. Every feature has a short description in the helpfiles, there are many examples of how to do the different tasks, and last but not least, the direct support from the TatukGIS people is excellent. I sent many questions during the last eight months and I cannot remember ever waiting more than a couple of hours for an answer.
For us, the main advantages of the DK, compared to other GIS development products are:
- the DK is written in native Pascal code, no extra DLL's to install in deployments
- a lot of possibilities to render shapes (symbols, patterns, styles, labeling features)
- SQL layers to store shared data in a database
- and all this for a very reasonable price.
Finally I can say, we do not regret switching from MapObjects to the TatukGIS DK. Through today, every apparent problem or limitation that we have encountered with the DK has been resolved.
Christian Kaufmann
Lead Software Developer
GeoLogix AG
Berne, Switzerland
http://www.geologix.ch
(Related items: 2015 News, 2014 Testimonial)