We had a pretty long day yesterday from our Quarterly Business Review in the morning all the way through to a dinner with some of the senior team and few key engineers and product managers.  We are always amazed there are a few great restaurants in our small town here in Scotts Valley.  

One of the things that was interesting as we pushed into some of the detail was how much our decision to adopt Eclipse is opening up our ability to deepen the value we can provide on the JBuilder platform.  While some other companies are definitely leveraging their proprietary access to the run time platform to compete, beating on openness with Eclipse seems to be having a dramatic impact on our ability to grow the value we deliver.  I am looking forward to our developers seeing this impact.  It certainly has impacted the products we are going to be able to deliver this year.   As we showed with our first step into the PHP world, we are committed to serving developers in new ways and we look forward to delivering on that commitment.

We also saw room for improvement in some of the basics:  helping you get your product shipped right or just helping you get it faster, taking our developer network efforts to the next level, etc.  The team is digging into the details and hopefully we can knock these down one at a time, the same way we do bugs.

Some of the interesting press on the Delphi and PHP announcements are below:

InfoWorld:  “CodeGear extends Delphi for PHP, Vista, AJAX”

The (Delphi for PHP) product provides a RAD environment that writes most of the PHP code for the developer, said Jonathan Benedicto, who uses CodeGear’s technology to develop Web applications such as e-commerce systems. "It’s very, very good," Benedicto said. The CodeGear product fills a market gap for a graphical tool for PHP development, he said.

eWeek:  “CodeGear Branches Out with New PHP, Vista, AJAX Tools”

CodeGear announces Q1 releases of Delphi 2007 and Delphi for PHP

Lot’s of new links added to my link blog related to today’s announcements….I want to know what do you think of today’s news.

“I think ‘Delphi for PHP’ is a fantastic thing. One that my employer, and I as a small business owner, are keen to look into.  Hopefully it will capture the minds of new developers who often start in languages line PHP. I personally would like it as I could have my wife, who has minimal but sufficient HTML knowledge to get into it. She finds the full ASP.NET a bit over complex and unnessesary. (We use Delphi ASP.NET for our business web site).” - Post by Robin.

CRN:  CodeGear Readies Delphi For PHP

Delphi for PHP is part of CodeGear’s effort to hook a new generation of developers on its classic Delphi tools, traditionally used for developing enterprise database and desktop applications. With the move into PHP, CodeGear aims to woo developers working with dynamic scripting languages, which are popular in Web development. A tools product for Ruby, one of the most-buzzed-about Web development platforms, also is in the works.