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."
How popular is delphi? I hear about it occasionally but never have really seen any evidence of it being used much..
Also, any decent samples of what it looks like, or tutorials? Just curious..
As a Turbo Pascal and now Delphi developer, I have used TurboPower components off and on for many moons.
I hate it that they are leaving the retail scene, but I am glad that they are leaving behind one of the best libraries Turbo Pascal/Delphi ever had.
My hat's off to them for this bold move. Now if we could just get an open-source Delphi-compliant compiler on Linux, I'd be happy. Yeah Free Pascal is pretty good; I use it, but it is not yet up to the level of Delphi under Windows in terms of features and libraries.
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
How long before we see some Kylix versions around?
I still use delphi after initially working on a large project with it about 6 years ago.
I still find it to be an exellent tool for whipping up small windowed apps for my own personal use. I find it to be fast and stable, and object pascal is a very nice language. As well, there is a large community of developers and open source code out there.
Delphi does have a bit of a 'cult' following. The largest user base, as far as I am aware, is in Russia.
All of the Russian developers at work love it, and they can't understand why we don't use Delphi (instead of the company mandated J2EE web-app architechture) to write small apps that only have a handful of users.
Given the way TurboPower ships most of it's components, I'd actually think this will not be much of a problem.
Pretty much when you bought a license of one of their components (such as AsyncPro), you got the source. One of my friends found a few bugs in AsyncPro, worked out how to fix them, and then alerted TurboPower about the bug and the fix. So the source has previously had a number of eyes outside of TurboPower actually reviewing it.
Plus (as I mention elsewhere) TurboPower have already got quite a number of their components working under Kylix, and seem pretty clueful on the whole. They seemed to have an attitude of "well, we need this, so lets write it ourselves!" rather than always resorting to high level API's or 3rd party modules.
Turbopower has always been uncoventional in its approach, and opensourcing their stuff, rather than taking it down with them, is a clear example of this. Their libraries are extremely useful, very professionally done, well documented and very stable.
;).
If they work well under Kylix, then this is an unbelievable bonanza for many Delphi/Kylix developers. If opensourcing them makes it easier to port them to be usable under FreePascal, then hallelujah!
I have been a Turbopower customer since the days of Kim Kokonnen's DOS TSR libs back in the 80s.
These guys really redefined the concept of customer service then - supporting a newbie programmer like me in Bangalore, India via Compuserve and mail was no joke, but they did it, and they did it well. Would you believe a small company today mailing huge amount of support material to a one-off customer on the other side of the world, at their own cost?
I was able to build products that earned me a tremendous amount of money in those days, and wouldn't have been able to do so had they not supported me the way they did.
I moved away from the DOS/Windows platform in the 90s after Linux came onto the scene, and ceased being a developer by the mid-90s (I am "just" a user now
But I do know whom to thank for my start - that would be Kim, Terry, Julian and the entire bunch of folks at Turbopower.
I am sad to see Turbopower "go away", but at the same time, I am glad to see that they are at least taking a stab at "immortality" by opensourcing their work.
You aren't remembered for doing what is expected of you
It has been a long time since I have dealt with them, but TurboPower software has been one of the best software companies I have ever seen. They have a history of making sensible decisions about what to program and how to program it.
I would very much like to have the source code to the free TPE, TurboPowered Editor. This was an excellent DOS editor. There may be Windows versions. If there is only a DOS version, I would plan to make a GUI version. It would be a great start on some HTML processing tools. I would be glad to act as coordinator for a SourceForge entry of the code. I still use the DOS TPE for some text manipulation purposes. Thanks, TurboPower, for the great software.
I tried to send them email, and got this response: "TurboPower has recently announced its withdrawal from the component library and developer tools market." They seem to be going out of business more completely than the story suggested. I read the story as them going out of the retail business, but I thought that there were wholesale ways of selling their products that they would continue. I guess not.
They were among the best a decade ago. They put numerous competitors out of business with their high quality, good support, good performance, and fairly decent design. Last I fought with them, not quite so good. They had evidently turned over staff, had expanded product line, and had been somewhat outdone by some competitors. When I called them with a bug report that one of their components was just about worthless, they no longer said that they would fix things ASAP and that a fixed download would be out soon; they said that it's a bug and that I should try one of their other components that provided something similar. So, I'm not surprised that they are giving it up. There is a steady stream of Delphi products coming out of Russia that must make life miserable for anyone in this market in the US. But with Turbo Power's components as a starter and more eyes looking at the code, the Russians might now have serious competition again.
I've seen two web services demos. One by a Borland guy using Delphi 6 when that was new (a little over a year ago IIRC) and the other by an MS guy using C# about 2 months ago. The Borland guy put together things that worked and did it quickly and impressively. The MS master kept fooling with his own equipment, groping to figure out how to change the font so the audience could see the demo. He couldn't. The demos went downhill from there. He couldn't accomplish more than a third of diddly compared to the Borland guy.
Of course, we'll all take any announcement of the open-sourcing of useful software as good news. However, I hope a trend doesn't develop where OSS becomes known as "what happens to software when companies die." I'd rather see software open-sourced in a profitable way as opposed to the "we're pulling out of the market so why the hell not" way that is becoming more and more common.
> Delphi IS 800 pound gorilla in all the places where
> decisions on tools are taken not exclusively by suits
Well, this eliminates the Fortune 500 and any other high-profile companies that industry publications (e.g. eWeek or InfoWorld) watch and target, which leads to a vicious cycle of tighter and tighter embrace of Microsoft tools. You can still sneak in Delphi in various ways into these environments, albeit not as an officially approved too. For example, in this VB (and at times reluctantly VC++) shop I often use Delphi for non-deliverable tools and utilities to save time, and project managers look the other way because they figure that nobody will have to maintain this throw-away code anyway.
Why reluctantly VC++? Well, once in a while you hit VB's limits, such as not being able to create non-ActiveX DLLs or implement certain COM interfaces (such as those containing method names with underscores), and while management doesn't always fully buy these limitations and thinks you're just making them up to be difficult (how could VB have these limitations--after all, EVERYONE is using it?!) they don't have a technical basis to deny your request and cave.
No. I meant that VB4 came with one executable program that had been developed in Delphi. MS blamed this on a contractor.
It seems that - notwithstanding the release of Kylix - not so many people around here are familiar with the Delphi scene.
.NET was originally created by Borland, and was given to Microsoft when MS last invested capital in Borland -- not to mention that the top people Microsoft has working on .NET came from Borland), but it's really a tragedy that Delphi doesn't have more mainstream acceptance.
Which is rather unfortunate. Delphi kicks the pants off VC++ for Windows development, as far as development time goes. Delphi's compiler puts out optimized code that's as fast, and on some types of operations, faster, than VC++. It's easy to read, easy to maintain, and easy for someone new to pick up on an existing codebase. It's strongly typed, but also provides an easy way to circumvent the type system when necessary. It's got an IDE that makes Visual Studio look clunky and outdated by comparison. And, best of all, it has a compiler for Linux now.
I don't know what's kept Delphi from gathering more mainstream acceptance. Maybe it's the stigma of slow P-Code that the old UCSD Pascal left the language with, or maybe it's underhanded marketing and business deals by Microsoft (there are many who believe that
NO CARRIER
I have to wonder if TurboPower releasing their tools as Open Source is more an act of sticking it to TurboPower's competitors than anything else.
Obviously, TurboPower could have sold their tools to one of their competitors but chose not to do so. At the same time, TurboPower's competitors who offer similar libraries will see their marketshare diminish (and their programmers get layed off) as people learn about "free" alternatives.
It seems to me that a large percentage of open source projects are open source because:
1) The project would not be capable of supporting itself otherwise.
2) It is a way for a company who is on their last legs to stick it to their competitors before going under. Saying in effect: "If we can't compete effectively, then you are not going to be able too."
Finally, it is sad to me to see TurboPower folding (or changing focus). TurboPower has been a key player in the Borland tools market for a very long time. I have never seen a bad comment about TurboPower among the Borland tools users which was most likely due to TurboPower's superior customer service. To see TurboPower folding makes me wonder what the future is for the tools market(s).
Almost all the criticisms offered by Ritchie were about the original Pascal, not the improved object oriented pascal that is used by Delphi. Almost all the looping, escaping, breaking, pointers and other features that a C programmer would expect in C can be done just as well with Delphi (Object Oriented Pascal). Object Oriented Pascal is to Pascal what C++ is to C, though it fixed some of the fundamental shortcomings of the language in the process where C++ did not (and did not need to by and large). The syntax may look different, but it's really very very similar to C and C++ these days. While I personally prefer C's somewhat more terse syntax, I really cannot say I miss much. I've been able to port back and forth without any real difficulty. If you do almost any sort of Windows application development and haven't tried Delphi, then you really are missing out. I would assert that Delphi could replace VC++ for most applications but for its relative lack of critical mass. This makes it relatively undesirable for large scale projects. Where it really makes up for the lack of critical mass, i.e., fewer Delphi programmers, is though its RAD features and components and other advantages (which are less desirable on large ones). It makes it worthwile in many cases for C and C++ programmers to learn Delphi (it's not hard if you come from that background) in smaller shops where rapid turn around time is needed. ...Yeah, it can be a slight pain working directly with the windows (not always/usually necessary) and other C/C++ APIs because it's non-native, but it does work well.