Slashdot Mirror
TurboPower's Delphi Components Going Open
Luiz Bucci writes "According to the company web site, TurboPower Software announces their immediate withdrawal from the retail component and developer tools market. As part of the move, TurboPower announces its intention to release their award winning component libraries as open source to the maximum extent possible.
The resulting open source projects will be hosted on SourceForge." (SourceForge and Slashdot are both part of VA Software). TurboPower's libraries cover "compression, serial communication, faxing, Internet communication, scheduling, data entry, encryption, and XML manipulation."
Well you can download a demo at Borlands website.
I learned MS C++, MFC programing before finding Delphi. Borlands IDE makes development quick an painless.
Delphi is most often used as a RAD tool for building frontends to databases, so you see it used A LOT in large companies for inhouse tools, but it is able to build any type of app or dll that you would want.
Many popular apps are also writen in Delphi but sometimes it takes a keen eye to pick them out.
HomeSite formerly by Alaire http://www.macromedia.com/software/homesite/
Motherboard Monitor http://mbm.livewiredev.com/
Inno Setup Installer http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php
To name a few that you may have heard of
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
Have you not heard of Kylix Open Edition? You can't be refusing to use it just because the compiler itself is not open source since you just said you use Delphi. Download it and give it a whirl. The new version lets you program in Object Pascal or C++.
Kylix 3 Open Edition free download
There's historical precedent for gambling companies pushing the state of the art in computing. Some of the earliest work in commercial computers was funded by American Totalizator, the company that built racetrack betting systems.
It seems that - notwithstanding the release of Kylix - not so many people around here are familiar with the Delphi scene. A feature that has distinguished it from its Microsoft competitors is that it is very easy to write good object-oriented components for it. Partly because of this and partly because there is a good 'Delphi scene', for many years there have been large numbers of free Pascal libraries and componenets on the Web. You'll find many of them catalogued on sites like the Polish Delphi Super Page and the Russian Torry's Delphi Pages, as well as the inevitable SourceForge.
In this environment, all software houses that make Delphi components have struggled to make money. Only the very best have survived - who is going to pay money for a slightly dodgy replacement tree control when the slickest, fastest one available is an Open Source freebie?
TurboPower was originally the most innovative of companies, and even if it had lost its way a bit in recent times its passing as a Delphi component vendor is an occasion for regret. You'll find any number of free Delphi libraries for doing serial comms; I suspect that only TurboPower's includes a complete terminal emulator with its own scripting language, and only TurboPower's that includes a fully-fledged fax modem driver complete with all the very tedious stuff to encode and decode Fax TIFF files. All this conscientiously and beautifully documented. There are many other examples of excellence in TurboPower's large range.
I don't claim there is any reason why all this shouldn't have evolved in an Open Source environment. But AFAIK it hasn't. If the success of Delphi as a tool for Open Source development means that companies such as TurboPower can no longer survive, then I think long term all Delphi (and Kylix) programmers will be much the poorer for it.