Slashdot Mirror
Borland C++Builder Revolt
florescent_beige writes "Developers using Borland's C++Builder RAD tool are in revolt. Borland apparently obsoleted this product one year ago. However, the promised migration path (to be described in a now infamous open letter) never materialized.
In a last-ditch effort to convince Borland to support them, users have put together a letter justifying (and begging) for continued support."
Poster writes
Slashdot places this story in the "fight-the-man dept.".
Asking or begging a proprietor to do what you want is not fighting anyone, it's acknowledging that you are not livin in freedom. Placing yourself in a dependant position by not choosing free software to do the job doesn't bode well for leveraging a free market to supply the desired changes or improvements. Ironically, all the customers the letter cites are capable of paying for the support they want. Perhaps these developers should put some money and/or time into getting someone to distribute a free software program that does what they want so they won't be in this position.
Digital Citizen
if a RAD tool is open source then people can put some time on making their RAD tool better and better. Borland here just puts a dead end to a product which seemed to have some followers. Not good for Borland, not good for Borland users. Now opening up the source seems like the right thing to do.
Same old Borland, indeed. Every couple of years or so, the management seems to misread/forget/ignore the core developer clientele that has kept them alive through their difficult times. This still occurs despite offering online polls for feedback on what developers want in the next version of $product.
.Net-is-now-Win32-is-legacy pill. Borland releases C#Builder (not their own C# implementation, just MS C# in a Borland IDE) and Delphi 8 (.Net only, no native Win32 support). Kylix is pretty much ignored for the time being. CBX sort of looks like it's intended to replace both BCB and Kylix and is missing the GUI builder - after all, nobody wants native Win32 GUIs anymore - they'll just use C#Builder or Delphi 8 for that, right?
.Net stuff, but wonder what genius at Borland decided to drop Win32 from Delphi 8. There isn't enough interest in C#Builder to refer to its "community" - at least not yet, and maybe not ever.
Evaluating Borland's recent actions in light of their overall history, it seems fairly obvious to me what the fumble was this time: Borland gets chummier with Microsoft and completely swallows the
The BCB community is grudgingly accustomed to taking a back seat to the Delphi crowd, but even so, CBX isn't received well at all. The Delphi people like the
At least the JBuilder fans don't seem to have to deal much with this kind roller coaster ride. But for a while some Borland observers were wondering if Borland was considering dropping BCB and even (gasp!) Delphi to become an all-Java vendor.
These Borland snafus and mixed signals are indeed typical. It's almost as though there's some Borland-specific el nino that turns things upside down every now and then. Just wait a year - the weather will change.
T
Perhaps Anjuta would be more use to them in conjuncion with gcc? Here are the features and here is the eye candy.
Products like C++ Builder are not only fancy IDEs and compilers, but they come with very rich class libraries. If someone has invested years of development time creating applications using these class libraries, thier discontinuation is a disaster if they are to continue to develop their application without rewriting it from scratch using different libraries, or in a whole new language environment.
Stick Men
Borland has killed off : Codewright, Kylix,C++Builder
and left their developers high and dry.
Their flagship Delphi fails to work on XP systems
with the latest SP 2 applied.
They have long promised and failed to deliver
Compact Framework support in Delphi
Their head of Borland Developer Network, John Kaster is alternatively rude to or dismissive of developers
legitimate concerns.
All these are signs of a company in decline and serious internal disarray.
I would suggest that anyone thinking of using or continuing to use Borland products have a good long hard think about the consequences of their decision.
Just look at how Kylix and B++ Builder developers have
been abandoned. Some of us are desperate, we have large codebases that we foolishly wrote in Borland C++ Builder.
Now our codebases have been orphaned.
Switching to Visual Studio
Borland, you have burned developers once too often.
"or tell me about an alternative language I should learn."
Consider contributing to the Freepascal and Lazarus open source projects.
As you say Borland isn't dead, and neither is Delphi. What should set alarm bells ringing is the fate of C++ Builder.
You may not like C++, but C++Builder is still a great tool, and despite the uncertainty it's still one I recommend to people.
One possible 'upgrade' route for BCB users is to port their code to Delphi. All your GUI will still use the VCL, so there's some simple C++ > Pascal 'recoding' involved there, and if you can encapsulate large chunks of your C++ code into DLLs or packages, you can call that from Delphi with few problems - in theory.
But, the main reason that approach scares the shit out of me is that Borland could just as easily pull the plug from Delphi as well. BCB isn't being canned because it's rubbish, it's being canned because Borland can't make a 'compelling business case' NOT to can it.
"Developer Tools" are only 30% of their turnover nowdays - they're focused on 'enterprise', 'alm' and 'SDO' (whatever that is - investor-attracting snakeoil, I suspect)