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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."
Many of the components may be developed using licensed code from other companies and/or covered under 3rd party patents.
Before we open up the champagne, let's see just how many of the components will be in a usable form for new development.
jason
No one has seen what you have seen, and until that happens, we're all going to think that you're nuts. - Jack O'Neil
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.
if they contain a great deal of win32 specific code, then a while. if little or no win32 specific code, then a few weeks after release.
jason
No one has seen what you have seen, and until that happens, we're all going to think that you're nuts. - Jack O'Neil
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.
A number of TurboPower's components (such as AsyncPro) are already available for Kylix. Also TurboPower were known for helping out Borland with Kylix, particularly by helping pioneer a number of components moving to Kylix.
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).
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
Pascal is good in some areas:
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...
But I guess we need to finish lazarus first
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.
GNU Pascal uses ISO Pascal syntax which is quite different than the Borland dialect. So convert the Turbo Power to GNU Pascal could be pretty involved. On the other hand, the Free Pascal has a Delphi compatible mode. So compile Turbo Power in Free Pascal should not be a big problem. The only question is how many of the components depends on VCL. The Free Pascal is still lacking anything equivalent to VCL.
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.
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.
From the Shutdown FAQ, in my own words: "We feel that most of the other DOS products will not have sufficient demand to successfully support an open-source project."
Well, Borland already released the Turbo Pascal 5.5 binaries. I have used those to teach children programming on their own DOS boxes. Turbo Power had great library releases for every Turbo Pascal DOS version, wouldn't those be interesting for people who are still working with these?
I honestly have to admit that - in spite of my fandom for all Turbo Pascal DOS stuff - I have no idea, is GNU Pascal or Free Pascal under Unix any good? I have succesfully got RHIDE working after some compiling hassles, but not really tried it with lots of code. How portable is my old DOS stuff? Can I use FreePascal to let children play with it under Linux in my place, and under DOS at their home?
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.
No. I meant that VB4 came with one executable program that had been developed in Delphi. MS blamed this on a contractor.
The reason why you don't see more Pascal development, at least in Unix world is probably this:
Wow, the close-mindedness of that piece is wonderfully hilarious! I'm getting tired of seeing Kernighan's paper cited. Of *course* the developer of a competing language doesn't like his competition!
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.
Pascal was strict. Borland broke the locks when they produced Turbo Pascal (20 years or so ago). They put in an ABSOLUTE directive that let you make variables share storage, so that you could interpret the same memory in different ways. They put in fast variable length strings. They put in a MOVE intstruction so that you could flop arbitrary bytes around wherever you wanted to. They put in raw access to ports and memory addresses and interrupts and all the low memory data in DOS. With these changes, programmers loved Turbo Pascal, and it sold a many times more copies than anything else for programmers had ever sold.