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."

Comments

good VB alternative

[exhilaration]

I think this would provide the open source community with a good alternative to VB.

I don't use Delphi, never have, nor do I plan to, but I'll welcome any product that gives further credibility to open source and free software. And I'll applaud any company that takes a product open source - it takes a lot of guts to release the code to a product that might be supporting your company.

Not such great news

[uradu]

If Delphi were the 800 pound gorilla of development tools, fine, the more companies open their products, the better. But as things are, the last thing Delphi needs is major component vendors throwing in the towel. It's sad because Delphi offers one of the few sane and productive alternatives to Microsoft's painful tools and frameworks (.NET shows promise but isn't there yet in terms of maturity and widespread use).

Random thoughts (off-topic)

[stikves]

I know this is offtopic, but I have somethings to say as a (former) Pascal user.

Pascal is good in some areas:

• Pascal is very "neat" (except for pointer syntax, which has been fixed in ObjectPascal/Delphi).
  
• It's fast, especially in development time.
  
• It's well known and it had been used widely.
  
• thus, there is alreasy too much source code and binary components readily available (anybody remembers SWAG?).
  
• It's strongly typed (not an advantage for evertone, though).
  
• It's object oriented and has a very nice syntax (compare and avarage MFC code with a Delphi one and see).
  
• It's portable (thanks to GNU Pascal and FreePascal, the latter is much better).
  
• There are already a very sufficient library support for FreePascal (if anything is missing, you can import C libraries easily).
  
• It's good for database programming (i do not know why, but some vendors used to mix SQL in Pascal or vice versa).
  
  However something is missing (except for A^[13] syntax): the applications. There are too many tools (IDEs, RAD tools, libraries). There are many DOS and Windows apps, but it's not used in Linux, yet.
  
  And here some ideas for using pascal...
  
  
  • mod_pascal: OO programming for Apache, with use of existing data access and XML objects.
    
  • server console: anybody remembers Netware console? Instead of the regular shell, we can start the servers in a special console application, probably using TurboVision or similar.
    
  • gui applications: Delphi is a very nice and rapid way to deploy GUIs, with Kylix and lazarus, we can start a gui movement (especailly frontends to various Linux software), until mono is ready.
    
  • marketing: Kylix is there, but not much used. Why not advertise it as a movement path for developers (MFC -> VCL -> CLX -> Linux).
    
  
  
  But I guess we need to finish lazarus first :)