I spent Tuesday in the Borland Twyford office preparing my slides and code for the first stop of the tour - Stockholm on Thursday morning. I’ts always harder on the second day in Europe because of the jet lag and recovery from the coach flight from San Francisco to London Heathrow. There are great things happening over here in Europe. The “DevCo” team (sales, marketing, services) is well integrated together and moving forward across the EMEA (Europe Middle East Africa) region. The Borland Developer Tools Group is organized and executing on our Q2 plans. We will kick off the Borland/“DevCo” spring update at the first tour stop.
Meanwhile, progress continues on our products roadmap planning and on R&D work in progress. We are now 13 days away from the next preview of JBuilder “Peloton” at JavaOne in San Francisco. If you are going to be at the show, make sure you stop by booth 220 to see the latest internal build being demonstrated. Also stay tuned to the unveiling of the JBuilder roadmap at JavaOne (and on your local news outlets).
As the week progresses I will slowly switch over to Europe time and by this Saturday will be living on the one time zone (even though I am working on two time zones - local and Scotts Valley). Before I left Caliornia, I had a call with Larry O’Brien (an old industry friend, former editor of Software Development and Computer Language magazines, and software industry blogger). I was following up, with Larry, on a column he wrote for SD Times about his reactions to the “DevCo” announcement. Larry’s follow up blog entry contains some quotes from my conversation and Larry’s additional thoughts on “DevCo” opportunities. Some other things
Is Delphi “past its peak”? Are all popular languages based on extensions to C? The great thing about languages is that there are lots of choices. There are languages for all requirements, domains, and needs.. Languages stay alive because developers use them and vendors keep adding capabilities to help simplify complexity. Delphi is the only language and component library that is similar on both Win32 and .NET. Developers also still have full access to Windows API and .NET API. We’ve added the language capabilities needed for .NET and we’ve also put them into Win32 including “for in” loop iteration, function inlining, class visibility, class methods/fields/properties, class helpers, nested types, operator overloading, and namespaces. We are on the road to .NET 2.0 where we will add new capabilities to the language including generics (parameterized types, templates) to the Delphi language. We will also strive to continue to keep compatibility between the native code and managed code versions of our compilers. We have Windows 64-bit and .NET compact framework on the Delphi road map. Delphi will then have language and library across 16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit Windows and versions of .NET and the compact framework.
Object Orientated Programming (OOP) started with the Simula programming language, designed and built by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard at the Norwegian Computing Center (NCC) in Oslo between 1962 and 1967. The use of OOP has grown to become the most popular programming paradigm (and, I and others believe that it will remain the dominant programming paradigm for years to come). The Delphi language has grown far beyond its beginning as the Pascal language. The Delphi language is Pascal + objects + components (properties, methods, events) +++. Interfaces and multiple interface inheritance were added to the language to make Com/DCOM programming easier in Delphi 3 ( 2+ years before Microsoft came out with Com+). We extended the same interfaces capability to add Web Services support to Delphi. When the Delphi team is asked to add something new to the language, the first questions they ask are “what problem are you trying to solve” and “what complexity are you trying to simplify”. The answers to these questions could require a new language feature, a new library, a tooling feature, or combinations of all three. It is our never ending quest to improve the process of programming, to harness complexity, and to solve real programming pain points that drives the language and the product forward.
Delphi/Borland Developer Studio and JBuilder continue to receive rave reviews from customers, magazines, and others. We continue to win awards. Delphi is used more in Europe, Asia, and Latin America than in the US. Is it hard to compete with free? We were the first vendor to create and ship free fully functional foundation editions, well before Eclipse and well before VS Express editions. We base our JBuilder and Delphi success on building value above that level. Free tools with commodity level of features have been part of our business model for years. We will continue to drive productivity and value as we move JBuilder onto an Eclipse foundation core. There are 12 million developers around the world growing to 17 million by 2009. Developer tools (including IDEs) are a profitable, growth business.
{ 7 } Comments
I like and use Delphi. However, I feel that your discussion of the "Delphi peak" timing might be more balanced, since Delphi is behind VS in some areas. For example, Delphi Rich Edit knows about MS Rich Edit 1 and 2, while the current version is 5. There are always some SDK headers that are not yet translated into Delphi and the best way to use them is C++ Builder. Delphi interfaces are a nice language feature spoiled beyond recovery by COM: I do not need reference counting and Query Interface in the language. Why COM interface had not been made a child of plain interface? Now MS quits COM and goes to clean interfaces in .NET… AFAIK, Delphi for .NET makes all objects garbage collectable. IMHO it is much less cute then MS C++ that allows to create both garbage collectable and traditional objects. OK, Delphi will be .NET 2.0 compatible soon. What about the price for those faithfull who have to go through unoperational Delphi 8 and 2005 to finally working 2006 and then upgrade again just to get close to VS? BTW, when C++ Builder will be .NET 2.0 compatible? Yes, there USED to be free foundation editions. What will be the Borland answer to the free Express set of MS tools available NOW? Is Delphi 2006 written in Delphi 2006 (as VS is written in VS) or does Borland know any other way to guarantee quality? How much time does it take Borland to replace [0..0] arrays with some smarter language feature so that Win32 functions work with range checking on? Despite all the above, Delphi people may be proud of their work. I just want to use this opportunity to reach them directly to get sure that they stay realistic.
Andrei –
Can’t leave your post unresponded to on a couple of points.
1. The issue is the language, not whether Delphi supports a particular external control or not. Your point is valid to a certain degree, but not the point at hand.
2. Interfaces in Delphi are not "spoiled by COM". Interfaces in Delphi exist and function completely separate from COM. They are reference counted, but that doesn’t mean they are tied to COM.
Nick
Delphi the IDE running in Windows is written in C#, C++, C, J# and Delphi (the language) itself.
> 2. Interfaces in Delphi are not "spoiled by COM". Interfaces in Delphi exist and function completely separate from COM. They are reference counted, but that doesn’t mean they are tied to COM.
You are absolutely right - you can use interfaces (and multiple interface inheritance) for everything in your programming. They were added to make com programming easier, but they are greatly useful for other programming tasks.
Interfaces were mentioned in context of D3. At the moment they were COM based, so Andrei partly right. They still wait to become language integrated more like in java.
Also saing that D was the lead in COM arena is kind of ridiculous, we all know it. D was and is consistently behind MS technologies (thought a way better then any MS product across the history). That was Andrei point. And it’s still valid.
I very like D and wish it all the best! But it will go away eventualy if situation not improves.
Meantime Borland laying out people… So, David must forgive me, but you speaches, sound like bla, bla, bla…
Until i see "DevCo" alive with my eyes, until new version released, there is nothing to talk about. All this prizes and awards is just a panegyric for dead body shadow…
Mike:
"Meantime Borland laying out people… So, David must forgive me, but you speaches, sound like bla, bla, bla… "
Your point is? What Borland does has no meaning with regard to DevCo; DevCo is a separate entity even now within Borland.
Ken
> Ken typed - DevCo is a separate entity even now within Borland.
You got it right. We’ve been working towards this day (when we are an internal group) since the February 8th announcement. Next stop, an independent company.
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