A lot of Embarcadero folks, including CEO Wayne Williams came down to celebrate with us CodeGearians.

Here’s a shot of a small portion of the party:

Chris Bensen (photo geek extraordinaire) told me to get a picture of feet, so here you go:

Greg Jorgensen is chatting with David I (out of focus):

Nice shirt, Greg! (everybody got one)

I just couldn’t resist shooting Michael Swindell off of Mark Howe’s shades:

More artistic and crazy pics can be found if you click on any of these pics and play around!

Enjoy!

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I logged out of our web sites so my personal profile information would not affect our default location presentation. Here’s the default "global" globe when you’re not logged in:

After I change my location to "Australia" I see:

After I change my location to "France" I see:

After I change to "Greater China" I see:

(Note that the language also changes to the "default" language for each location, but that’s the way our location support has always worked.)

Our other supported locations also have globes rendered to display something closer to the location selected.

It’s a trivial tweak, but I think it’s important to acknowledge the importance of our customers in every location on the globe.

P.S. The nice new website design was done by Mark Hannah, and rapidly implemented by Jonathan Benedicto.

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What’s different today? This morning it was foggy and drizzly at my house south of Santa Cruz.  There was no traffic on Highway 1 North on the way to work.  Now the sun is coming out in Scotts Valley.  We are now part of a 500 person, $100 million company focused on application developers and database professionals. We now have more people and resources to innovate and help you succeed than we had yesterday. We have joined together to focus on innovation in our existing products and the creation of new solutions.

Our mission is all about building software tools. It is about providing tools that are independent (and supportive) of a platform or stack vendor’s offerings. We’re about building software tools for students, hobbyists, developers, professionals, consultants, independents, and small/medium/large/extra-large businesses.

The rate of growth and volume of information and data is incredible. Information and software drives the modern economy. Applications are needed to process and present the information. People create the applications. Twenty five years ago, at the time of Turbo Pascal 1.0, there were two million developers in the world. Today, the number of developers is growing at approximately two million per year.

Some people would tell you that tools don’t matter. That open source or the platform and stack vendors will solve every problem and satisfy every pain point. Today, software is no more reliable, no more predictable than it was before. We need to build better applications, faster, and with higher reliability. Our economy needs every designer, architect, developer, and administrator to be performing at the top of their game.

What are we focused on? Building the best tools to let you leverage the skills you are developing no matter what operating system, database, platform, stack, hardware, and architecture you are using today so that you can use those skills on the infrastructures you will be using tomorrow.

We are the “un-lock-in”. For those of you that are dependent on platforms, databases – our tools can work with you and for you. For those who have heterogeneous infrastructures or for those individuals, consultants, ISVs/Micro ISVs, SI/VARs, and OEMs who need to support multiple platforms - our tools can work with you and for you. For those developers who don’t use databases - our tools can work with you and for you.

Information Engineering and Software Engineering have now collided at Embarcadero Technologies, the largest independent provider that empowers application developers and database professionals with tools to design, build, and run software applications in the environment they choose.

How can we innovate to help you succeed? Do any of the following pain points resonate with you?

• My professionals have no independence because we are tied to a single stack (platform).
• Our team is wasting tons of time and resources with low-quality tools.
• I am an individual developer who has to build it all while competing with larger teams.
• Our team is very distributed, disjointed, and disconnected.
• My small group still has to build complex apps.
• Information Management and Software Development are in different silos at our company.
• Software tools are hard to access and expensive for my team.
• We are an ISV that needs to build quality, performant, global-ready packaged software.
• We build scientific and industrial applications pushing the envelope of non-database applications.
• We use Eclipse but waste time with different plug-ins, multiple editions, and lack best-in-class tooling for real development work.

What are your pain points?  500+ Embarcaderians are ready to help!

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I just finished listening to a company (Embarcadero not Borland) wide conference call announcing to the whole company the closure of the Embarcadero+CodeGear deal. Wayne Williams, our new boss, made some very encouraging statements. Most notably was that just like ER/Studio, RapidSQL, and DBArtisan, Delphi/C++Builder are core Embarcadero product offerings. This means that these products are key to the business. Yes, there are many other products being sold, incubated and introduced, but it is the aforementioned products that form the pillars on which the company is based. Without them, many of the other products would not be possible. Like the foundation of a home, you just don’t take a metaphoric jackhammer to them and expect the structure (the company) to remain sound.

Another encouraging (or maybe scary, depending upon your perspective) point was that we are the last independent tools vendor with the breadth of offerings we have out there. This means no vendor or stack lock-in. We have tools for nearly every database and OS platform out there. We are also one the of the very few software companies that offer very strong non-Open Source tools right along side tools built either on or for Open Source stacks. JBuilder and 3rdRail are built on top of the very popular Eclipse framework. Delphi for PHP and 3rdRail are built for the very popular and widely used Open Source PHP and Ruby/Rails environments, respectively.

How things will change or even stay the same is still being planned and scoped. A lot of work had been done between the announcement of this deal and its close, but now is where most of the work can actually take place. Now that we’re no longer joined to Borland, we can now chart a new course under a new captain. I wish all the best for Borland as I’ve seen many happy and exciting days while there.

An interesting anomaly is that many of the CodeGear folks have had their service bridged, which means that some of us have, on paper, now worked for Embarcadero longer then they’ve existed :-). This is now day 6022 for me.

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Today we are beginning the next chapter that joins CodeGear’s developer tool products and teams with Embarcadero Technologies. It is a great combination on so many levels, but on the simplest level it’s about tools.  Embarcadero is a company that is successful because it’s a high performance team that “get’s it” and understands the value of how ultra-productive tools benefit customers and listens carefully to the problems customers face. Everyday problems like getting complex database design, development, and management tasks done quickly with any customer relevant database platform.

It’s interesting to think about just a few of our neighboring customers, roles, and products. For example, today Embarcadero creates visual tools to help data and application architects model and understand complex logical and physical databases, sound familiar? CodeGear creates award winning visual modeling tools to help architects and developers visually model and understand applications. Embarcadero creates the most popular SQL IDE in the world for writing and debugging SQL and stored procedures. Used by more than 3 million developers globally, CodeGear creates some of the most popular app dev IDEs in the world for writing and debugging software applications for a variety of popular platforms. Embarcadero is in beta today with a new database profiling and optimization toolset that is simply amazing to see in action. CodeGear develops one of the most popular Java profilers and optimization tools in the Java market.

Before today Embarcadero and CodeGear separately created ultra-high productivity tools for designing, building, and running databases and applications.  Starting today Embarcadero Technologies is the company building tools to help application and database developers (sometimes on the same team, sometimes the same person, occasionally mutually exclusive) get difficult tasks done quickly, with quality, and for a wide variety of database and application platforms.

A few things we care a lot about

• Flexibility. Database support must be heterogeneous and seamless
• Open Source. Our customers must achieve more value (speed, quality, productivity) from Open Source than their competitors are getting
• Speed. If it’s slow it’s broken.
• Teams. Tools should enable team members to work together more efficiently and seamlessly with the tools they own. Tools that force processes, stacks, and platforms aren’t designed with real people in mind. Sell them to someone else’s boss.
• Price. Tools should be widely available and fairly priced offering high value to every skill level and business size.
• Quality. Tools should help our customers deliver higher quality than their competitors.
• Stacks. Customers should be able to dictate software stacks based on their needs. Tools that dictate or steer to one vendors stack doesn’t have the customer’s interest at heart.
• Productivity. Customers need to be able to out-produce and outpace their competitors while still delivering higher quality.
• Community. Embarcadero is community of millions that includes employees, customers, partners, resellers, component and add-on vendors, students, journalists, and more

An Embarcadero is typically a waterfront wharf or pier, no doubt a launching point for many great voyages. Here’s to ours.

Michael 

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386 million what? Oh, David and Allen was mentioning days, so I just wanted a bigger number, since my number of years is less…

The below picture has nothing to do with anything, really. It’s last night’s smoggy sundown in Santa Cruz, and I figured I’d put it in here.

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For some perspective, I started when the Borland stock was around $80 a share (ouch). The new Borland Campus wasn’t completed. Borland occupied a reasonably large number of buildings throughout Scotts Valley. If Borland didn’t occupy some or all of a building, chances are Seagate did. To move between the various buildings, there was a continuously running shuttle bus service for Borland employees. I also remember the clout that Borland had locally. When we (my family and myself) first arrived and were looking for someplace to rent, when asked where I worked and I said Borland, suddenly we were at the top of the list without any kind of other checks. It was pretty nice.

After today, there will be no official presence of Borland in Scotts Valley. The only thing linked to Borland will be name on the lease they maintain on part of this building that was once the Borland Corporate HQ and campus. Embarcadero will sub-lease the space we currently occupy from Borland.

Even though there have been many things Borland has done over the years that I firmly disagreed with, they’ve also done some pretty good stuff too. I’ve learned so much more than I ever could have imagined about software, the software industry, developer tools, frameworks, and compilers. I’ve also had the pleasure of knowing and meeting many folks in the industry from all around the world.

Tomorrow will start a new chapter with new challenges and opportunities. I’m sure it will take some time until the dust settles, the cultures merge, and things settle down to the right groove. Don’t expect any earth-shattering announcements or radical changes immediately out of the gate. This is a new experience for nearly all involved, so some period of acclimation is bound to take place.

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I knew today was coming back on February 6, 2006 when Borland announced that they would sell off the developer business.  The whole process became real with the Embarcadero definitive agreement announcement on May 7, 2008.  In the past few weeks, while continuing to help drive revenue and awareness, many of us have also been filling out Embarcadero forms for insurance coverage, 401-k retirement fund planning, and other employment forms. Yet, it was surreal to be in the car this morning thinking about technology, products, and work items without thinking about the transition.

For 23 years I have focused on developers, tools, and software engineering.  Looking forward, I will continue to focus on developers, tools, and software engineering.  The combination of Embarcadero Technologies’ DatabaseGear and CodeGear products will give individuals, consultants, ISVs, SI/VARs, OEMs, small teams, and large teams unique capabilities, from an independent software company, across the database and programming spectrum.

We are focused on moving the state of the art in software engineering forward and continuing to add to tooling that embodies the best practices and knowledge of our craft. Come along with us if you are a software engineer and information engineer who

• cares about independence (even if you are dependent on a platform or stack),
• needs increased productivity and quality (even if you are sometimes forced to use less than productive tools),
• wants to be able to collaborate with other developers, designers, and architects (whether they work on your project or are part of your social network),
• enjoys being an active member of a community (even though you might, most of the time, just be a "heads down" developer trying to get the job done).

Whenever others have left Borland, I have added them to my Borland alumni list.  Tomorrow, I will add myself to the list. With CodeGear becoming a part of Embarcadero Technologies, the transition is different.  I am not leaving Borland per se, I am joining a company with the same tools heritage, shared mission, and common vision.  As for Borland, its employees, partners, and customers, I wish you all the best of everything.

How will I feel tomorrow when I drive in to work?  Will something be different?  I’ll let you know tomorrow.

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PowerSQL simplifies SQL development for application developers with many features for improving productivity and reducing errors. A rich SQL IDE with code completion, real-time error checking, code formatting and sophisticated object validation tools help streamline coding tasks. 

Embarcadero DB Optimizer maximizes database performance by enabling developers and DBAs to quickly discover, diagnose, and optimize poor-performing SQL. DB Optimizer eliminates performance bottlenecks by discovering data intensive or frequently executed queries, focusing in on specific SQL statements through query statistics (CPU, I/O, wait times), and optimizing any problematic statements.

Links to programs and products:

http://www.embarcadero.com/pmprograms/
http://www.embarcadero.com/products/products.html

Both of these products should appeal to all CodeGear customers who care about database development and database optimization.

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I wll demonstrate how Delphi for PHP brings visual development to the world of PHP, and how powerful is our PHP editor, debugger and profiler. Below a list of features will you see in this presentation:

• Source code features
  • Error Insight
  • Sync Edit
  • Structure Pane
  • Code Insight
  • Change tracking
  • Macro record
  • Code Folding
  • Bookmarks
  • Multiple editors
  • UTF-8 support
  • phpDoc support
  • Customize the editor
  • Code formatter
• Running and debugging a PHP legacy application
• Visual Designer and Templated forms
• Zend framework
• Build a database access

Register here

See you soon!!

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At this very moment David I is posting about what we were doing in Amsterdam on Wednesday.

On Tuesday we have been to Twyford, UK. Here discussing AJAX support in Delphi VCL for the Web framework with Delphi developers.

There is lot of good spirit in our company just few days before joining Embarcadero Technologies. Future just looks bright:-)

Now I’m watching European Cup quaterfinals and looking forward to SDN Event conference in Ede on Monday.

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This challenge goes to the heart of the C++ specification which is designed in terms of an abstract machine that all implementations must emulate.  The existing standard specifies a machine largely inherited from C with no notion of parallel execution, so the very foundation the standard is built on needs updating!

The lowest level of this work is known as the memory model.  This part of the standard defines the notion of parallel execution, threads and race conditions, and the dependency between the order of operations that a compiler must enforce.  To an extent this limits the range of optimizations available to compilers compared to a single-threaded execution, but also gives developers the guarantees they need in order to write programs without unexpected side-effects, such as the infamous double-checked lock idiom that frequently fails to work as expected in the presence of optimizations (some performed by the CPU itself, rescheduling instructions after compilation!)

Most of the memory model work has been resolved at earlier meetings, and focus has moved towards libraries and higher-level abstractions to make concurrent development practical.  However, even at this meeting a number of fundamental proposals were adopted.  Probably the most far-reaching proposal goes under the snappy name of "Minimal Support for Garbage Collection and Reachability-Based Leak Detection".  First up, this does not mean C++0x just became a garbage collected language!  However, this carefully crafted proposal inserts just enough requirements into the memory model to make a GC implementation practical and reasonable, so while GC is not a required feature we should expect to see garbage collected implementations in the future, although I expect many will come with a compiler switch to enable or disable the feature.  The cost of this feature is that some currently valid programs will find they rely on undefined behaviour in C++0x.  Generally, unless the GC switch is thrown, that undefined behaviour will continue to do exactly what it does today, so I expect few programs will break out-of-the-box.

To enable GC two new ways of describing pointer values have been defined.  A safely derived pointer is what you get from calling a memory allocation routine such as malloc or new, or a copy of such a pointer.  A reconstituted pointer is what you get when you start playing tricks with the value, such as using bitmasks or storing it in an integer variable.  When you restore the pointer value it is now reconstituted and it is no longer guaranteed to be safe to deference such a pointer.  This is the freedom that allows a garbage collector to reclaim memory.  If this kind of  behaviour is important to your program (and there are various well-documented idioms using these techniques, not least storing pointers in the Tag property of VCL components!) then you can call a new library function declare_reachable before ‘hiding’ your pointer.  Reconstituted pointers to an object previously declared as reachable can be safely deferenced, until after a later call to declare_unreachable.  This effectively gives us a way to tell the garbage collector about hidden pointers, so it does not collect too early.  This nice thing about this formulation in terms of reconstituted pointers is that it is not specific to garbage collection.  I am curious to see what other interesting applications turn up such as improved memory-leak detection tools.

Next time I will talk more about library support for concurrency.

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The new title of the webinar is: Open Source: Triumphs, Trials and Lessons Learned  

While the focus is still around taking internal "high-level" resources and tasking them to create an IDE for the team, department, or enterprise built on open source technology to use and some of the larger issues around that process.  The meat of the information being shared is around Open Source, Open Source standards, Open Source Licensing issues and heads up information.

This webinar shares some lessons learned at CodeGear since we have been using and participating in Open Source projects for many years.  As an aside, almost everyone of our products uses some type of open source part in one form or another.   

The initial feedback from the first one was great, actually excellent, but again I felt that the title and information did not match as closely as it should.

If you have some extra time on June 26th:

Reserve your Webinar seat now at:
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/160245500

The only thing I can hope for in the next edition of the webinar is more feedback and participation from the webinar attendees.  I was hoping that more people would have stated "we don’t agree" or "your wrong" but most people stated "wow, I did not know that."  Hopefully this time, the presentation has been updated and maybe I can get a few more people to interact.

Also, let me know if you like the idea of creating a blog posting afterwards to continue the conversation?  I thought it was a good idea but we had limited additional participation.

Hope all of you can make it… check out http://www.codegear.com/webinars for a list of all the webinars.  

More to come…

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Before the start of the seminar, I received a copy of issue #2 of the Blaise Pascal magazine.  The magazine is available in printed and download editions.  You can learn about all things Pascal and Delphi from the top authors including Bob Swart, Marco Cantu, Julian Bucknall, Hallvard Vassbotn, and Jeremy North (just to name a few).  While there is a good amount of information about Delphi programming in our product and on our developer network, I hear from developers that you need more.  Blaise Pascal Magazine gives you additional technical and how to articles of use to all Delphi and Pascal programmers.  Check it out!

Also here in the Netherlands is the Software Development Network.  SDN covers CodeGear products in their conferences, website, and SDN magazine. This October (6 and 7), SDN will have their annual Software Developer Conference 2008.  Nick Hodges, Delphi product manager, will be in attendence giving technical sessions along with additional CodeGear and community presenters.

In Germany (where I was last Saturday) there is also Entwickler (Developer) Magazine that covers technical topics for CodeGear products.  Entwickler also runs the annual EKON and European DevCon conference.  This year the EKON 12 conference is October 27-31.

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The webinar covered:

Get the most out of the UML functionality in Delphi 2007. This session will go over the recommended UML diagrams for Developers. It will focus on the "what & how" of using UML in the day-to-day operations.

At this Webinar you will learn how to use:

• Class diagrams
• Use Case diagrams
• Sequence diagrams
• Other areas touched on:
  • Refactoring - Model vs. Code
  • Static Code Analysis
  • Static Code Metrics

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Google translate doesn’t really do a good job, so maybe I can dig up a good translation soon.

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To give you a flavour of a typical standards meeting, we typically see around 60 delegates from all corners of the C++ community.  Obviously compiler and library vendors are present with a very strong stake in the standard they will have to implement!  Also a variety of interests on the user side are present, from research institutions like Fermilab to commercial users like Adobe.  A most valuable addition to the mix are acceademic institutions like INRIA itself, and Texas A&M University has a thriving department led by Bjarne himself.  These departments are often the source of the most creative new features as ideas that become familiar in computer science research filter down in practical ways for modern languages.  The most obvious example this time around has been Concepts (more about these in a future post) but important features such as lambda functions and variadic templates also came out of this direction.

A meeting lasts six days, much of the opening morning given over to status reports and planning for the week.  Likewise, the final afternoon is given over to reports on the week’s progress and formal motions to adopt new features for the standard.  There is also a dry run on the Friday afternoon so that contentious issues can usually be taken off the agenda to build another meeting’s worth of consensus.  This helps to run an efficient Saturday meeting - which can be handy when you have transport plans for leaving later that day.  It also means that the Friday meeting is usually the more ‘interesting’ one!

The other aspect to running the meeting is that it is essentially two meetings in one, an ISO meeting for national standards bodies, and the ANSI (more spefically INCITS) meeting for the American delegation itself.  This means that typically two votes are taken on each motion, one to determine the US vote, and a second to determine the ISO.  There were 7 nations represented at the last meeting in Sophia-Antipolis, France, Canada, Germany, Holland, Switzerland, UK, USA.  If your nation is not listed and you think they should have a say in the future of C++, now would a really important time to get them interested because…

… one of the key topics and early decisions made this meeting is to try to finalize our timetable.  The new standard is going to be a big deal, there are at least new 50 language features planned, ranging from small features like default template parameters for function templates, to seriously far-reaching features like Concepts.  In addition to incorporating the new language feature the library is almost doubling in size! Pulling all this together has been a huge ammount of work, but it is important to finally close out the submissions and ship the standard.  We spent some time weighing up the risk and cost of large new features like Concepts versus the timetable, and came up with what we hope will be the right balance.  We plan to ship a feature complete Candidate Document (CD) at the next meeting, which means we should have everything we plan to include in the next version of C++ written up in formal Standards language, and we plan to spend a little more time cleaning up the document to make the specification as tight and precise as we believe an international stadard should be.  Essentially, C++0x should be complete next meeting, bar the bookkeeping and bug-fixing.  The purpose of shipping a CD is that an official ballot is called for all participating ISO nations to approve the document and make comments, so this will be the first real test of whether we have got our feature-set right.

Next the timetable calls for the Final Candidate Document (FCD) to be produced in the next 12 months, so we can send that out for a ballot around September next year.  That ballot should also produce comments. If we are approved we can pass a final version of the document, further ammended in response to comments and now dubbed the Final Draught International Standard (FDIS), along to the top level of ISO/IEC for the final vote to adopt the standard.  Again, we anticipate 12 months and 3 meetings to resolve FCD comments before sending out the FDIS.

So now we have a timetable with a clear plan to release a standard in just over 2 years.  Essentially, C++0x will be ‘complete’ this year, 2008, but the final standard is likely to be available around 2010, or early 2011.  So 0x may be 08, or hexadecimal 0A, depending on your point of view!

Next time I’ll talk about some of the features that were discussed and approved during the meeting.

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As a quick introduction, my name is Alisdair Meredith and I am the product manager for CodeGear C++Builder.  I am also the CodeGear representative at the ISO C++ standards meetings.  I plan to talk about a variety of things in this blog, from C++ best practices, getting the most out of our product, observations on the industry and standards processes in general, to presenting important changes coming to the language in the form of the new C++0x standard.

Before joining CodeGear I spend 11 years using C++Builder daily as a customer, writing applications used in Formula 1 racing.  Meeting tight deadlines with reliable products was key to our success, and I believe C++Builder was the main reason we were able to deliver consistently over that time.  I am very aware of how much people rely on our tools, and aim to continue making C++Builder the most reliable, productive C++ tool available.

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What might be possible for next generation development environment functionality?

• SQL “insights” and “completion” in the SQL property editor and in the code editor
• Modeling your code and database in one IDE
• Stepping through code and stepping into a stored procedure
• Profiling and optimizing a database and your program
• Refactoring database and code at the same time

What else do you need/want?

These are just a small number of possibilities. In fact, the more time CodeGear and DatabaseGear R&D and Product team members spend together, the list will grow exponentially. What else should we work on together? Taking a step back from a specific programming language, specifiy product, specific platform - what else do you think the combined group could do to help you be more successful?

I am in the UK now for meet ups Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday I will be in Amsterdam. Looking forward to your comments and suggestions.

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