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Interbase And Kylix Details From Borland/Inprise Con
"The conference opened with a "Matrix" themed intro, and there have been blue and red jellybeans all over the place. The major announcement at the intro was that JBuilder will be ported to Mac OS X, with full support for Aqua. The press release is here.
Paul Beach, Interbase VP of marketing and sales, gave a very informative talk. It's very clear that he has a clue. Many of his talking points were interchangeable with what Bob Young would say, asked similar questions. He even alluded to the tired old Heinz ketchup analogy to explain brand equity. Interbase's plan is to sell support contracts and box sets, just like the other big open source companies. Paul is very realistic and down-to-earth about what they expect to happen. I think they are going to do very well indeed.
The most startling revelation, though, was that Interbase 6.0 is done and ready to ship the manuals and CDs are duplicated and printed and sitting in boxes. He even brought a box of CDs to the talk. Reading between the lines, it seems like these CDs have been sitting around for some time. But Dale Fuller (Inprise CEO), who also showed up at the Interbase product address, will not permit the CDs to be distributed until all the contracts are signed and executed and appropriately lawyered. Dale promised, both at the opening keynote and at the Interbase talk, that the contracts would be done and the product would ship within two weeks. Here's hoping he holds himself accountable to that promise.
Many details about Kylix have been revealed. Kylix is installed on several machines in the lab, but unfortunately these machines are off the net, so you can't steal a copy (darnit). The IDE was demoed at one of the talks, but it wasn't in the lab. What was on the lab machines was the command-line Delphi compiler only. It seems quite solid. I played around with it, built some projects that displayed various forms and controls, that sort of thing. As expected, the compiler is blindingly fast, builds genuine native executables, and looks very similar to Delphi on Windows. The new class libraries, called CLX, are very nearly 100% source-compatible with the Delphi VCL. The CLX visual components are wrappers around QT, and will be available on Windows as well in Delphi 6, so if you code to CLX you will be cross-platform. Kylix builds fully compliant QT apps, with KDE-style theming and all the bells and whistles. As with all QT/KDE apps, you can run a Kylix-developed app under Gnome but it isn t seamless for purposes of theming or UI consistency.
Kylix will, of course, be closed-source, closed-process, proprietary, and will have a price notably divergent from zero. The initial release will be Delphi standard and professional, followed quite quickly by C++ standard and professional. The enterprise version of Kylix will be called "Kylix Studio" (or similar) and will include both compilers in a single SKU. Someone in the audience suggested that they do a combined SKU under Windows as well, which got a lot of applause. At the opening keynote, Dale said that a major goal for Kylix is to make it possible for developers to release their own projects under any license, including full-strength GPL. This is a worthy objective, but I'm not sure Borland truly understands the ramifications. Then again, I'm not sure I do myself. What would it mean to have a GPL project, but you have to use a proprietary compiler to build it? Presumably the compiler libraries will be proprietary, and you have to link with them if you want a usable binary. This bears thinking about.
For database access from Kylix, there's a new library called dbDirect. Or perhaps it's called dbExpress. And I think it might also be called DataCLX, or perhaps DataCLX is a superset including dbDirect plus other things. Anyway, whatever it's called, it's a new library that lets applications talk to databases in a consistent way just like the BDE. But unlike the BDE, it tries to be as 'thin' as possible, bringing the application code as close as feasible to the native database vendor APIs while still providing relatively good code portability. With the BDE, Borland has to write a complex driver for every new database they support. With dbDirect, it's a simple matter of wrapping a few vendor API calls. Application developers can mix and match calls to dbDirect with calls to native database APIs. dbDirect will also have a tiny footprint compared to the BDE, including the ability to statically link right into the application. DataCLX will be the only database API in Kylix, and will ship in Delphi 6 side by side with the traditional BDE setup.
Kylix will also include a web broker architecture, very similar to what's in Delphi 5 today. Where Delphi web modules can compile to traditional CGIs or ISAPIs, Kylix web modules will compile to traditional CGIs or Apache modules. The level of integration between Kylix and Apache is impressive. This part of things is called NetCLX and also includes the usual socket components and TCP-suite stuff like telnet, smtp, etc.
In addition to the Borland announcements, there are a few dozen vendors on the trade show floor. Big names include Sun, Caldera, Linuxcare and Cobalt. Corel is pointedly absent. And of course we have the usual gang of third-party component vendors people like TurboPower, Woll2Woll, Raize, Digial Metaphors, etc. Everyone seems to be planning to port their tools to Linux, promising release dates from a couple weeks to a couple months after Kylix ships.
The bottom line is, I'll be coming home empty-handed. No Kylix beta, no Interbase source. But I have a very strong sense that the Delphi community is gathering behind Kylix in a big way, and I'm very pleased to see Interbase poised on the verge of release. Just get those contracts signed, Dale!"
Kylix is one of the most dangerous pieces of software to come to Linux. One of the big differences between Windows and Linux has been that Linux has one compiler (gcc) and open libraries so that everyone can compile everything. Kylix breaks that since now Kylix owners can compile software that I cannot. This will cause a split in the devoloper community that will make QT/GTK seem like a friendly gathering. Kylix forces developers to either ignore software or develop with non-free software.
Kylix creates software that can only be compiled with non-free software.
Regarding speed; if the Kylix you could play with was command line only then I would be very surprised if it wasn't fast - I know from experience that several hundred thousand lines of Delphi code compile in seconds on a bog standard development machine, inside the IDE. So using the command line compiler should be that quick, whether on Windows or Linux.
In fact, having grown into large scale programming using (BP7 then) Delphi and then Java, being forced in my current job to use C++ and waiting ages for compilation and then linking annoys me intensely. Luckily the C++ is only a small part of the job and I use Java most of the time - code, compile, test, repeat every 2 minutes or so leads to far higher quality code far quicker, and just isn't possible if it takes more than a couple of seconds to compile.
~Cederic
There's some FUD going on in here - we need to clear some things up.
Kylix is going to be a big help to a lot of Windows-only shops that are now looking to migrate their development to Linux. Imagine; spend a few days modifying your app, and now it works on Linux. Of course, that assumed that you haven't used any COM stuff, but there are a LOT of apps that don't. Besides, in the Windows community, database access is one of the major reasons to use COM anyways. Sounds like Kylix/Delphi 6 will have that covered with the new database library. Exciting stuff.
Second, some Slashdotters are concerned about being able to only compile stuff with non-free tools. While it is true that you will have to have a copy of Kylix to compile stuff for it, I don't really see why this is an objection: lots and lots of commercial vendors are now going to be shipping stuff for Linux. This is another way to accelerate that. Perhaps some Free Software vendors can get some good usage out of it too. Who knows. I don't understand the logic behind complaining about havign more than one compiler, as one Slashdotter did. We have more than one everything else (soon, more than one kernel even.) Competition is good, right?
On a side note, what is an SKU? I haven't heard that term before, and it's use in the article stumps me. What does it mean, especially in the author's context?
I have seen it runnin on my machine. I own a small Linux consulting company in Brasil and was invited by Borland to talk about Linux on a conference they gave for Brazilian developers. They asked me for a linux box in which they could demo Kylix, so I brought my own box. It's a PII 400 with 64 Megs. I did no scientific bechmarks on it, but the demo apps we built on Kylix compiled at least 10 times faster than the same code on their own Windows box (which was also a PII, but that's all I know about it). As a demo, we had the app up and running under Gnome while Delphi was still compiling it on the Windows side.
Unfortunately they made me uninstall Kylix before I brought the box back. No amount of pleading, cajoling or even begging would work, which is why I can't send you a pirate copy ;)
I think they probaly have a reason for not letting anybody have it, but the reason is not that they're demoing software on ridiculously overpowered CPUs or anything like that. I wouldn't call my PII ridiculously overpowered.
Also, the robust object model basically means that if a VCL object is not up to the task, create a new task, inheret and modify. No probs. There are I believe projects out there to create open source VCL replacements, so even that aint a prob.
With the gnarled exception of the compiler being closed source (Free pascal is a worthy replacement tho) I think it's majik for the linux community. Wan't a RTF word processor? Drop in a rich text component. make some save/load/print buttons. run. work. joy. The linux revolution is afoot!
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
The conference opened with a "Matrix" themed intro, and there have been blue and red jellybeans all over the place.
What happens if you eat the blue beans ?
Do you wake up in Redmond ?
The reason why there's no Kylix software to take home is that it's still in beta, and the beta program is closed.
This doesn't mean that betas can't be demo'd.
Incidentally, the final proceedings CD is usually never available til weeks after the conference anyway...
Delphi's compiler is already blindingly fast, so there's no reason to assume that they're using high powered machines to pull the wool over anyone's eyes.
The report looks like something that actually happened at BorCon. How does this make it a rehash of a press release?
"That's why they invented RPMs...."
No, RedHat (the 'R' in RPM) 'invented' RPMs to close the gap until InstallShield Corporation or someone else came up with a solution that worked in the *nix kernels of various flavors. It was created to distribute distros and make _initial_ installs (of the OS and ancillary packages -the 'P' in RPM) easier and more friendly. Thereafter, it was assumed the user would use 'gzip,' 'bz2,' or 'tar.(gz),' to uncompress the package/product and 'make' to install it.
RPMs have become 'the prototype that wouldn't die' since they -seriously- mess up the target OS (unless it is _precisely_ the OS the RPM binary was compiled on) and strew ungodly amounts of crap throughout the file system.
"End-user don't need to build software, developer do..."
The _best_ thing about the Open Source movement is the ability for _everyone_ to become a developer, responsible for their environment, and with the tools to exercise that responsibility. Now there is a non-free (beer and speech) compiler/tool/libs that threatens to take that essential paradigm away. The poster of the original article did not say what the retail price-point of the Enterprise version of Kylix will be, but judging from JBuilder (a _great_ product, by the way) you can expect to pay about USD$2500.00/seat (more overseas - for less!) or more for the Enterprise version of Kylix Studio.
I agree with the first poster in this thread. This is _very_ dangerous and has the potential of forking the tree in a way not envisioned in the GPL or by Linus. I wonder how this is going over in Redmond? Has Borland/Inprise bought into 'embrace and extend?'
All the above said, the practical use of Kylix could be limited to in-house projects in shops that need the cross-platform compatibility or the utility of Borland's otherwise excellent optimizing compilers and customer service/community. Otherwise, there are plenty of tools/libs for Pascal (Delphi) and C++ in the Open Source tree. These tools and libraries should be used, (rather than the proprietary tools mentioned in the article) for distros and products that _truly_ support the community. At the very least, sysadmins, techs, and managers of Linux and *BSD shops should _carefully_ examine the products they install for GPL-flavored libraries and modules, and watch out for the inclusion of proprietary code such as what Borland will offer, lest they get too far down a one-way highway.
I really wish Borland/Inpise had donated a tool the whole community could use. There is no real difference between 'Kylix Studio' and 'Visual Studio' in this context. It makes me sad that yet another company does not yet 'get it.' I only hope that this prompts the various open IDE projects (KDevelop, the GNU efforts, etc.) to move _much_faster!_
Remember guys, this is Amerika. Just because you have the most votes, doesn't mean you get to win.--Fox Mulder
I thought we'd been over this before.
If you write a GPL'd program that requires closed libs (either compiler libs or OS libs), then that's OK, because your code is a 'derived work' of those libraries, not the other way around.
If the libs are GPL'd, then you can't link proprietary code to them, which is what the FSF wants. "We'll share our libs with anyone who's willing to share back", but if you write GPL code that needs to be linked to proprietary libs, then that's your perogative as you wrote the code. No-one is 'using' your code as a base, you're using theirs.
K.
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
Hello,
.deb and .tar.gz packages are available.
- -----------------------
It is with great pleasure that the Free Pascal Development Team announces
that
Version 1.00
of the Free Pascal compiler has been officially released on 12 july 2000.
The Free Pascal Compiler features:
- A Turbo Pascal and Delphi compatible compiler for the Intel processor
family, with some extensions to the Pascal and Object Pascal dialects,
such as operator overloading.
- Full debugger support with GNU GDB.
- An OS independent Run-Time Library, equivalent to the Turbo Pascal
and Delphi Run-Time Libraries, not dependent on external libraries.
- An API allowing for OS-Independent screen, keyboard and mouse
management.
- Many units, interfacing to various API's: gtk, xforms, zlib, ncurses,
sockets, X, mysql, postgresql, Interbase, paszlib, opengl, libgdb.
- A Free Component Library, containing many base classes from the
Delphi VCL.
- An IDE resembling Turbo Pascal's IDE (currently Beta quality) with
full GDB debugger support.
- More than 800 pages of documentation in Adobe PDF format, featuring
+ User's guide
+ Programmer's guide
+ Reference guide
+ reference guide for all units in the Run-Time Library
+ More than 440 complete example programs.
(Other formats include plain text, HTML and PostScript)
- Full sources to compiler, RTL, docs, packages.
More information can be found on:
http://www.freepascal.org/
Installations are available for the following platforms:
Dos - Using the go32 extender
Windows - Native Windows binary
Linux - RPM,
OS/2 - Using the EMX extender.
Amiga - Based on version 0.99.5
Select your nearest download location from:
http://www.freepascal.org/sdown.html
(Beware, not all mirrors may be up-to date yet...)
or you can go directly to the FTP site:
Dos - ftp://ftp.freepascal.org/pub/fpc/dist/Dos
Win32 - ftp://ftp.freepascal.org/pub/fpc/dist/Win32
Linux - ftp://ftp.freepascal.org/pub/fpc/dist/Linux
OS/2 - ftp://ftp.freepascal.org/pub/fpc/dist/Os2
Amiga - ftp://ftp.freepascal.org/pub/fpc/dist/Amiga
Installation instructions can be found on the web-page.
If you experience any problems with the installation, please let
us know, so we can correct them as soon as possible.
Enjoy !
Michael,
speaking for the whole Free Pascal Development Team
-----------------------------------------------
If there are Pascal programmers out there who want to target Linux, I suggest you check out Free Pascal. If you must have a nice, user friendly GUI rather than a straight command line compiler, then I suggest you check out Lazarus, which is an open source version of Delphi for Linux. It's still in the early stages of development, but it is coming along nicely and shows huge potential, IMO.
--
www.scorbett.ca
Kylix is sure to unleash a flood of new GUI applications for Linux, as "anyone" will be able to build the GUIs, and many should be able to learn the Pascal language. Many traditional, popular Windows applications may be ported as well. All in all, Kylix will be great for Linux!
--
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
I did no scientific bechmarks on it, but the demo apps we built on Kylix compiled at least 10 times faster than the same code on their own Windows box
Boy does that sound like a load of bullshit, and I'm saying that as a professional Delphi 3/4/5 developer. Are you comparing this with Delphi 5? On a P-II 450 Delphi 5 (or 4 or 3) compiles all but EXTREMELY large projects in a virtual instant, so how exactly are you timing this FUD 10 times faster claim? The reality is that the demo was likely extremely simple and compiled close to instantly on both machines.
Linux doesn't make the processor run any faster, and in Windows 2000 or NT 4 the processor sits at 0% when I'm not doing anything, leaving 100% for Delphi to do its thing in, so any difference between the OS' will purely be the result of the coding abilities of Borland/Inprise. The file system is unmatched in 2000 (NTFS) and the memory infrastructure is good. Having said that what would be the difference? Does Windows insert special SLOW_DOWN_OP opcodes in the instruction stream? Does Linux have special RUN_SUPER_FAST_OP opcodes? No of course it doesn't. Barring multithreaded or multiprocess issues, where 2000 is considered superior anyones, there'll be no real difference. The operating system is a facilitator, it isn't an interpreter.
Something like Kylix for Linux (although it'll be astronomically more complex than a Project1/Edit1 type demos that port great) is a great step and it'll be great being able to port to Linux relatively easily, but the reality is that it brings realism to the equation : Why bother with Linux? What does it really offer (apart from the ridiculous 10x faster FUD) that you don't get (usually better) in Windows 2000? Forwarding a cult, or conversely spitting in the face of Microsoft, isn't a valid selling point for most corporations (except for Sun "you don't have any privacy so get over it" and dumpster diving Oracle).
Good to see Inprise doing this though as they are an awesome company with some incredible products. From a educated perspective I will say that the whole porting issue will be infinitely more complex than many portray it, but it'll definitely be easier than using two totally disparate development platforms.
Cheers.
This will be one of the most important events for corporate acceptance of Linux in a non-server role, since Delphi is used by a lot of companies to develop their software. Since Kylix will be pretty much the same as Windows Delphi, changes to the source code in order to port an application will be minimal (at least in terms of the usual process of porting), and may make companies think about moving over from Windows to Linux, especially those companies which provide and all-in-one of software and hardware to customers.
So we may see Linux begin to really encraoch upon the business software market, which whilst not the intention of Linux, is still a large market and a great opportunity.
---
Jon E. Erikson
Jon Erikson, IT guru
Essentially it's Delphi for linux, but I have to wonder why they are keeping the linux and windows versions distint.
Sure I realise there are some very large parts of linux missing from windows, and vice versa, but surely the way forward is to abstract these details as much as possilbe from the programmer.
Sure it means that low level components have to be developed seperately for each OS, but this would make code immediately compile on both platforms.
I haven't looekd in on this project for a LONG time but you may want to check out REALbasic (just noticed they wrote IE for mac in it :)) because it lets you build Mac and Windows from the same source, despite the OS differences.
None the less, I love borland/inprise/whateverdafucktheyarecalledtoday, and their software and so long as it's not another JBuilder (cringe) i'll be happy :)
You really get the most from the bottom line of his message: he's not coming home with anything.
Every conference I've ever attended has revolved around building hype and excitement. The key isn't how much hype is left after an hour, but how much is left after you've gone home with (or in this case, without) a copy of the tools to actually play with and find fault with. Trust me, when you go home emptyhanded, there's a reason. Everything seems great when you take it from a jolly Matrix-themed conference with cool jellybeans, but when you're sent home without a CD, that really says something.
If Microsoft pulled a shenanigan like this and compared itself to the Matrix, we'd all be cracking jokes about it and saying that the software was an illusion. In this case, though, the guy is actually singing the company's praises! Hello? No software to take home? Doesn't that scream vaporware? We wouldn't tolerate it from Microsoft, and we shouldn't tolerate it from anyone else, either.
Granted, you saw it running on a few machines that weren't on the net. It was blazingly fast. Wow. Did you see what was inside the machines? What kinds of processors? Don't we always point fingers at Microsoft for pulling the same trick, demoing software on ridiculously overpowered CPU's and shovelfuls of memory?
Am I the only one who thinks this "story" is nothing more than a rehash of a press release?
What's your damage, Heather?
Follow your own advice guys ;-)
In its early times, Borland was somewhat developer friendly. Solid products and good documentation (at least judging from that times standards). At that time the GNU project was just starting, and most development was closed source. Borland was just that - a closed source company - but the Turbo Pascal community was somewhat different. There were groups like SWAG, and the ftp site at garbo.uwasa.fi (from Timo Salmi). Sharing code snippets was pretty common. Even the commercial libraries for Turbo Pascal used to cost much less than the equivalent ones for C, and almost all of them included source code. This was one of the reasons was Pascal survived so long - specially if you consider the strong pressure towards C (and later C++) in the academia and the industry.
Delphi was one of the most underrated software products in history. It alone saved Borland from bankrupt after a string of bad management decisions. Its amazing how many developers use it today. Maybe C++ or Java has more magazine coverage, but almost all commercial shops in Brazil use Delphi for things ranging from quick and dirty apps to full blown corporate suites. Its power and flexibility are amazing.
I think Kylix is going to be a very strong product, one that builds upon the strenghts of Delphi. It also can take Borland back to its initial days, and make Linux a truly viable alternative for commercial software development. The Pascal community can make a strong difference. Object Pascal structure makes easier than ever to share components, and the vast amount of quality free code for Delphi (RXLib is a wonderful example) is a tribute to this.