Sip from the Firehose

Big news today for CodeGear employees and our community.  Today, May 7, 2008, Borland and Embarcadero Technologies announced that Embarcadero Technologies has signed a definitive agreement to purchase CodeGear. Together, Embarcadero and CodeGear are expected to create the world’s largest, independent software provider of development and database tools. Here is the landing page containing information about the announcement: http://www.codegear.com/about/news/embt.

Big news indeed, and great news for everyone who cares about application and database development. This is a perfect marriage on so many levels. Imagine what we will do together to help move software and database development to new heights. What a perfect day (what a 23 years for me)! I can’t wait to get started and help close the deal. I can’t wait to get online and on the road to introduce CodeGear customers and partners to the Embarcader products and show you what we will do together.

I was in San Francisco yesterday at JavaOne and our Thirsty Bear Brewery JBuilder 2008 Application Factory party.  At the party, Greg Keller (Embarcadero VP of Product Management), Greg Davoll Embarcadero VP of Marketing), and I were quietly whispering over in the corner and dreaming the dreams developers dream, remembering early days of development (several of the Embarcadero executive team members learned programming with Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++, and the whole company is filled with developers), and wondering whether we would be able to wait until this morning’s 4am announcement (hard to sleep with so much to do and so little time). I’m reminded of the Dr. Seuss book, "Oh the Thinks You Can Think!". But first things first, with the definitive agreement signed and the press releases out, now we can really get started!

All of the news, the fun, the excitement, and the sleep deprivation aside, I know that we have to continue to show you what we can do.  We have to continue to communicate and deliver.  We have to continuously prove that we can innovate and grow our products and company.  If you are from Missouri ("the show me state") or from Milan (and everywhere else between), we have to continue to help you be successful so that we can deserve your ongoing and future business.  I appreciate all of the calls, emails, and newsgroup posts I’ve received.  I know we don’t have all of the answers to all of the questions (yet).  So we’ll continue to communicate, to deliver, and to move forward.

Go Embarcadero!  Go CodeGear!  Go Borland!  Go Developers!!!

Read the Embarcadero press releaseRead the letter from Embarcadero CEO Wayne Williams

Read the community letter from David I (me)

Read the FAQ

Read the blog post by Greg Keller, Embarcadero VP of Product Management

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CodeGear is exhibiting at JavaOne in San Francisco this week.
  http://java.sun.com/javaone/sf/

JavaOne Survival Kit: Free Beer, Great Dev Tools

After you see the only morphing, transforming, self-teaching IDE at JavaOne you may feel like celebrating.  If so, let us buy you that beer.  After a long day on the show floor at JavaOne, you may need a break.  Come hoist brews with CodeGear Chief Evangelist David I and SourceForge.net Community Manager Ross Turk as they discuss JBuilder 2008 the Eclipse-based Java IDE that gets smarter with every app you build.

We’re gathering at 5:30 on Tuesday, May 6th just after the first day of JavaOne.

We’ll demo JBuilder with Application Factories, sample organic beers with Brew Master Brendon Dobel and eat great food all at The Thirsty Bear Microbrewery right around the corner from The Moscone Center.

  Thirsty Bear Microbrewery - http://tinyurl.com/3p2nsv

While you’re waiting for the party to get started, enter to win one of two American Express $1,000 gift cards in our "See-And-Be-Seen" T-Shirt Contest.
Enter now because the supplies are limited, the T-shirts are free and the money will be nice to have too.

  T-Shirt Contest - http://www.codegear.com/teecontest/

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Dr. Dobbs (DDJ) has posted an interview with CodeGear JBuilder’s Principal Architect Ravi Kumar.  In the interview, Ravi talks about capturing developer intent and application knowledge using JBuilder 2008’s Application Factories technology.  You can find the interview at http://www.ddj.com/development-tools/207404272.

If you are at JavaOne 2008 this week in San Francisco, you can see Application Factories in action at our booth.  Stop by and see how to quickly build working applications from pre-defined scripts and application templaces.  You will also see how to create your own reusable modules.

DDJ interview: http://www.ddj.com/development-tools/207404272

JBuilder 2008 product page: http://www.codegear.com/products/jbuilder

Application Factories screencasts on CDN: http://dn.codegear.com/article/37808

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It was 25 years ago, today (May 2, 1983) that Borland was founded here in Scotts Valley California (actually the company was formally registered in San Jose California).  Twenty-five years of innovations, product releases, announcements, and events including some listed below.

• 1983: Borland International founded by Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad and Philippe Kahn (CEO)
• 1983: Turbo Pascal v1.0 released ($49.99)
• 1984: SideKick launched
• 1986: Taken public on London’s Unlisted Securities Market (USM)
• 1987: Borland Announces Turbo C v1.0
• 1988: Turbo Pascal v5.0 ships with integrated debugger and dynamic memory manager
• 1988: Turbo C v2.0 ships with integrated debugger
• 1988: Turbo Assembler, Turbo Debugger, and Turbo Profiler v1.0 are released
• 1989: US IPO on NASDAQ, Quattro Pro spreadsheet launched
• 1990: Borland Announces Turbo Pascal v5.5 (with objects) and Turbo Debugger v1.5
• 1990: Borland Ships Turbo C++ v1.0
• 1991: Borland Ships Turbo C++ and Turbo Vision
• 1991: Turbo Pascal for Windows v1.0 with Object Windows Library
• 1991: Acquisition of Ashton-Tate is completed
• 1992: Borland C++ v3.1 is released with Object Windows Library
• 1992: Borland C++ for OS/2 ships
• 1994: Borland Announces Interbase 4.0
• 1995: Delphi v1.0 is launched on Valentine’s Day
• 1995: Borland includes Java plug-ins within Borland C++ 5.0
• 1996: Delphi v2.0 is released - first 32-bit version of Delphi, support for Windows 95
• 1997: JBuilder v1.0 is launched
• 1997: C++Builder v1.0 is released
• 1998: Acquisition of Visigenic is completed
• 1998: Name of company changed to Inprise (Integrating the Enterprise)
• 2000: JBuilder v3.5 is released - first all Java version of JBuilder IDE
• 2001: Name of company changed to Borland Software Corporation
• 2002: Borland Completes Merger with Starbase and Galaxy Acquisition Corp - StarTeam and CaliberRM
• 2003: Delphi for .NET ships - first Delphi version to support .NET v1.0
• 2003: Borland Acquires TogetherSoft
• 2006: Announced Developer Tools Group would become a wholly-owned subsidiary CodeGear; Acquired Segue Software with its base of testing products
• 2006: JBuilder 2007 is released, first JBuilder built using the Eclipse framework
• 2007: Delphi for PHP v1.0 ships - CodeGear’s first PHP IDE, includes the VCL for PHP component library
• 2007: 3rdRail v1.0 is released - CodeGear’s first Ruby on Rails IDE
• 2008: Delphi/400 is released - Delphi and Delphi for PHP RAD/Visual connectivity to IBM Series i (AS/400) computer systems

You can see additional Borland/CodeGear timeline events at the Computer History Museum.

Serguei Dosyukov keeps an up to date History of Pascal and Delphi page.

We’re 25 years young.  You’ll continue to see new innovations, products, and announcements for years to come. Post your favorite Borland/CodeGear programming moments and remembrances as comments to this blog post.

Thank you to all of our customers for your support and encouragement for the past 25 years!

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I previously blogged about Microsoft and Intel funding parallel computing research at University of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley), and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).  Now several technology companies (Sun Microsystems, Advanced Micro Devices, NVIDIA, IBM, Hewlett Packard, and Intel) are funding parallel computing research at Stanford University’s Pervasive Parallelism Laboratory (PPL).  Kunle Olukotun is the Director of PPL.  According to several news reports, the announcement will take place this Friday, May 2nd.  Here are links to several of the articles and documents.

• Race Is On to Advance Software for Chips - New York Times
• STANFORD NEWS: Stanford, Tech Giants Team up to Enable Software for Parallel Computers - Stanford Press Release
• Stanford Pervasive Parallelism Laboratory presentation
• NVIDIA to Sponsor New Stanford Parallel Computing Research Lab - NVidia Press Release
  

Stanford’s Pervasive Parallelism Laboratory home page

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Donald Knuth, author of the all-time best Computer Science book series (in my opinion), "The Art of Computer Programming", was recently interviewed by Andrew Binstock for informIT.com.  The interview is very indepth covering programming, methods, tools, history, architecture, and more.  I’ve listed a few of the interview highlights that caught my eye.

On unit testing: "the idea of immediate compilation and unit tests appeals to me only rarely, when I’m feeling my way in a totally unknown environment and need feedback about what works and what doesn’t. Otherwise, lots of time is wasted on activities that I simply never need to perform or even think about."

On sequential methods versus parallel techniques: "The field of combinatorial algorithms is so vast that I’ll be lucky to pack its sequential aspects into three or four physical volumes, and I don’t think the sequential methods are ever going to be unimportant. Conversely, the half-life of parallel techniques is very short, because hardware changes rapidly and each new machine needs a somewhat different approach." "I might as well flame a bit about my personal unhappiness with the current trend toward multicore architecture. To me, it looks more or less like the hardware designers have run out of ideas, and that they’re trying to pass the blame for the future demise of Moore’s Law to the software writers by giving us machines that work faster only on a few key benchmarks!"

Comparing literate programming to traditional techniques: "In my experience, software created with literate programming has turned out to be significantly better than software developed in more traditional ways."

On extreme programming: "With the caveat that there’s no reason anybody should care about the opinions of a computer scientist/mathematician like me regarding software development, let me just say that almost everything I’ve ever heard associated with the term extreme programming sounds like exactly the wrong way to go…with one exception. The exception is the idea of working in teams and reading each other’s code. That idea is crucial, and it might even mask out all the terrible aspects of extreme programming that alarm me."

It is a great interview with lots of insights and thought provoking answers. Thank you Andrew and Donald!

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Today you will see new look and feel for the CodeGear web sites.   Both the www.codegear.com and dn.codegear.com have new, cleaner look and feel.

You’ll also find new content on the CodeGear site including drill down capabilities into the feature matricies for each product.  For example, go to the Delphi for PHP product page and click on the "features" link.  You get to a page of features, each links to text about the feature with a screen shot (eventually there will be links to short video demos as well). Other product pages will get these capabilities as well.

We’ve also added a new feature, the solutions pages, that provide information about building solutions using CodeGear products.  Current solutions include Database development, Software Archeology, Modernizing System i Applications, and building Web 2.0 Applications.

I hope you like the work that the CodeGear Marketing/IS and the Community team have been working on for many months.  You can leave your comments on this blog post and I will forward them along to the team.

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The recently announced Delphi for PHP 2.0 is receiving some very nice press coverage. 

Here are a few of the many articles that have appeared so far:

CodeGear upgrades PHP IDE - Performance, database support boosted in an effort to make PHP development similar to working with Microsoft’s ASP .Net platform.  InfoWorld. http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/04/13/codegear-php_1.html

CodeGear Enhances PHP Tool - CodeGear Delivers Delphi for PHP 2.0. eWeek. http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/CodeGear-Enhances-PHP-Tool/

CodeGear widens database support in upgrade to Delphi PHP 2.0. SD Times. http://www.sdtimes.com/content/article.aspx?ArticleID=32014

CodeGear Releases Delphi for PHP 2.0. Application Development Trends. http://adtmag.com/article.aspx?id=22490

CodeGear’s Delphi PHP suite gets nip and tuck job. The Register. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/14/codegear_php_delphi/

PHP IDE Space Gets Competitive - CodeGear releases new version of Delphi for PHP, with Zend framework and HTML template support. Internet News. http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3740726/PHP+IDE+Space+Gets+Competitive.htm

New Version of Delphi, Visual Dev PHP Environment. PHPBuilder. http://www.phpbuilder.com/news/item.php?id=1445

CodeGear Accelerates Web Development With New Version of Its Visual Development Environment for PHP. PHP.SYS-CON.COM. http://php.sys-con.com/read/541896.htm

CodeGear offers drag-and-drop web development. ZDNET UK. http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39386012,00.htm

Additional Delphi for PHP 2.0 information

Delphi for PHP product page

Press Release

Datasheet

Top reasons to buy

Feature Matrix

FAQ

What’s New in 2.0

Reviewer’s Guide

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Are you using CodeGear’s 3rdRail™ to build your Ruby on Rails applications? Do you need a place to deploy and test your Ruby on Rails servers? CohesiveFT provides virtualized servers to easily create your Ruby on Rails applications for testing and deployment.

Cohesive FT’s Elastic Server™ On-Demand helps you build a Ruby on Rails virtualized Elastic Server so you can deploy and test your Rails applications in a real environment in minutes! Once your RoR Elastic Server is built to your specifications, follow the instructions to upload your Rails applications to your Elastic Server.  You can also choose to move the server to other cloud services including Amazon’s EC2, Google’s AppEngine, etc.

CohesiveFT provides Rails 1.x and Rails 2.x servers: Ruby on Rails 1.x Elastic Server and Ruby on Rails 2.x Elastic Server.

Six simple steps to develop, provision, deploy, test, and run your Ruby on Rails applications

1) Use 3rdRail to develop and locally test your Rails application
Use CohesiveFT to:

2) Choose your Rails stack components
3) Build your server
4) Download and start your server

5) Deploy your application
6) Restart the Rails Server using the console.

CohesiveFT’s Elastic Server On-Demand

CohesiveFT’s 3rdRail Portal

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We are here in Bangalore this week for the JAX India 2008 conference.  CodeGear is a silver conference sponsor.  Several talks were given by Ravi Kumar (Principal Architect of JBuilder), Jeff Anders (JBuilder Product Marketing Manager) and myself.  We gave the following talks: Developer UML, Software Archeology, and Introduction to Application Factories.

  (Ravi, Jeff, and David I at JAX India 2008)

Our booth has been crowded each day with attendees wanting to see more about JBuilder 2008’s new Application Factory capabilities.  In India, with all of the outsourcing, employee churn, and devotion to process and methods, Application Factories is hitting the right chord with many developers.

Developer UML coveres the diagrams most useful for developers.  These include the Class, Sequence, and Use Case diagrams (can often also include the Activity and Communication diagram).  Software Archeology presents a process for understanding a body of code you might have inherited as a new member of a team, or as part of an outsourced project ("Imagine you just inherited 1,000,000 of code, what do you do now?"). 

Diagrams Supported in JBuilder:

Class diagram - Shows classes, attributes, and relationships between classes
Component diagram - Shows physical components and there dependencies
Composite Structure diagram - Shows the internal structure of a class and its collaborations
Deployment diagram - Shows the hardware and components deployed on the hardware
Activity diagram - Shows the step-by-step workflow of components in a system
State Machine diagram - Shows the different states of an object and its transitions
Use Case diagram - High level graphical representation of functional requirements
Communication diagram - Shows interactions between objects and sequenced messages
Sequence diagram - Shows objects and the messages exchanged between them

What is Software Archeology?

A process for approaching unknown software that we have become responsible for
An approach to unraveling the complexities of an existing application
A lightweight process for getting understanding of existing source code
The analysis of past applications to learn and understand why it was done that way

The Software Archeology process steps:

Visualize the code using UML diagrams
Check for Design Violations using metrics
Check for Style Violations using audits
Perform a Business logic review including code reviews, running unit and system tests
Performance reviews including profiling and code coverage analysis
Document generation

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