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Borland Divests IDEs to Focus on ALM
ShinyBrowncoat writes "Borland recently announced they are putting their IDE business up for sale (JBuilder, Delphi, etc.)." This move comes at the same time Borland announced they would be aggressively pushing forward with their Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) business by purchasing Segue Software Inc.
Borland, long the maker of some kickass development tools now is interested in aggressively pursuing a company whose opening paragraph on it's web site home page begins:
Sigh. I guess not they're pursuing the kickass world of business-speak (including but not limited to the term: Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)).
For the record, I'm not opposed to quality tools, but, first and foremost, application lifecycle management (ooops, sorry, ALM) is less a result of some tool "delivering quality optimization solutions that ensure..." and more a result of teams of people; clients, designers, coders, etc., that know how and what to do.
So long Borland, it's been nice knowing you.
Interesting shift in focus.
So anybody want to start a collection to open source them?
What's left of Borland after they sell off their IDEs? And, on a related note, why did Metroworks get rid of Codewarrior for the Mac/PC? Aren't the IDEs the crown jewels for these companies? Or are they being crushed by Microsoft Visual Studio on one side and OSS IDEs on the other?
Wow, Borland is still in business? I remember that I never got Turbo C to compile the examples that were in the book that came with it. I blame them for me not being such a great programmer.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
It wouldn't be so heartbreaking if Borland wasn't the company that basically brought the IDE to the PC with TurboPascal.
Edit, compile, run, debug, all from one program.
Wow! I used to love their products, but it just seemed like they had disappeared or something a few years ago. I NEVER hear about any projects done with Delphi or Kylix or whatever anymore. Sounds like all the MS-world (shops) have moved to Visual Studio (and increasingly to the .NET FW). They just released some apps recently (Together and Dev Studio), and I was less than impressed by them...
Sorry, but I won't miss them. They used to have nice tools, but it's been quite a while since then... My nostalgia has expired since.
I don't know what the purchasers will make from it, but I doubt it'll ever get popular again.
Oh, I'm not much of an Emacs fan.
Disclaimer: I am not a developer by training, and I typically work on small compiled things or moderate scripts at best, so this opinion is based on that.
I imagine that Borland is caught in the middle between the "give me every visual widget" people and the "command line editor" people. I tend to use vi or even nano when I'm writing something, not commercial software. I've found that I simply don't need commercial software to develop, compile, and test stuff when I have the ability to open several xterms. Yeah, I'll acknowledge that I lose the ability to step through the operation compared to what I knew with Turbo C for DOS, but it's not really something that I miss terribly.
I like the command line. I've tried X-native editing programs, and other than ones that I use specifically to define type faces and advanced formatting I always find myself returning to console editors. I don't do GUI programming at all, either, so the GUI is basically a really nice way for me to display a lot of text, when it comes down to work.
Some like Visual Studio and other IDEs, I've just not found a use for them. I also don't feel a need to buy something that does what I don't need when I have free things that will do what I need.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
JBuilder, like the other commercial Java IDEs, is being increasingly marginalized by capable free IDEs like Eclipse and NetBeants. Nobody uses VI to code java for a living for long.
It's a sad end. Borland once made the best assembler for DOS, for example. Sometimes the Microsoft assembler would produce the wrong machine code, so it was useless, at least to me.
Borland was the best in what it did in several ways.
But after Philippe Kahn destroyed Borland's chances by buying dBase and Ashton-Tate for $440,000,000, the company lost its way. I estimate that dBase was worth perhaps $40,000,000 then.
Mr. Kahn threw away $400,000,000!! That's the kind of thing that happens when a technical company has top managers who know nothing about technical issues, and don't care that they don't know, and don't have respect for people who do.
Managers who cannot understand the business of their companies often turn to evil; they destroy lives and they destroy their companies. There are many, many examples of this.
After the fall and the departure of Mr. Kahn, Borland became a small shell of itself, a shell that sold excellent software development tools and IDEs.
Now Borland is Borland in name only, like AT & T is now just a name that has been bought to disguise the ownership of a despised company, SBC. (It is not just my opinion that SBC is despised; many people say that.)
Ok, so now I finally know why this guy was named "Borland":
Borland has very powerfull and intuitive IDEs what are incomparable with most popular developer tools, like microsoft Visual Studio.
As a longtime Borland user (from Turbo pascal 1.0) I'm not surprised by this.
.NET.
Juilder is a good product but way too expensive.
Delphi was the greatest tool on the planet (IMHO) but they didn't do enough to Pascal to enable it to compete with Java and
As for C++ Builder. Much better than MFC but too little too late.
But the REALLY big problem was that they had nothing to compete with the communities that built up around other tools and languages. No MSDN. No Jakarta. No CPAN etc etc.
I learned Windows programming with Petzold and Borland C++ 3.5. (Still have the 24 diskettes it came on). Borland had a GUI-based IDE when Microsoft was still flogging character-based Programmer's Workbench. Borland's chapter on C was the essence of clarity and beauty.
We parted company at ver. 5 when the compiler would change its mind half-way through a compilation and declare undefined a global variable it had compiled ten modules earlier.
Also couldn't handle "new" in a DLL, causing corrupted memory. Surprise!
Slashdot entertains. Windows pays the mortgage.
I NEVER hear about any projects done with Delphi ...
Well, I do know of at least one program written with Delphi and still very alive: Total Commander, the best file manager for Windows ever. I wish Midnight Commander would be as solid, reliable and feature rich as it's Windows cousin. (And the lack of a Mac version is probably the main reason I don't also have Macs)
So, Delphi is definitely still used.
I still have Delphi 7 on my box--it's a tremendous tool for developing Windows apps.
However, I am also very very glad I switched to development with open-source languages a few years ago, and I'm switching more and more to open-sourced development tools to go along with the open-source languages I utilize.
To hitch software development to any company is becoming increasingly precarious, not only because these companies can go out of business (or out of control like Microsoft), it's because proprietary tools makers have this strange propensity to overbuild their products to the point of buzzword-itis and uselessness (Delphi beyond version 7 is clearly that, and MS long ago strayed away from what developers need).
This stupid action by Borland, a once-great company, provides us in the open-source community yet another example to tell the story that open-source is not "free as in beer", but "free as in freedom".
And I will also take this opportunity to make a request to Borland regarding Delphi: Instead of selling it, OPEN SOURCE IT!!!!!
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Argh, so much for my JBuilder duplicate code detection plugin. Such is life...
The Army reading list
This is a good chance for some initiative to buy the IDEs and open source them, like the Blender foundation did with Blender! Let's start some fundraising efforts!
... that Eclipse was maturing just as Borland was killing the Together IDE with their acquisition of TogetherSoft. Long story, but it was obvious from the beginning that they (a) had no clue what a good product they purchased and (b) wanted to kill it in favor of JBuilder et. al.
v.m
I have a "Zero Policy" tolerance.
*/
Now that ActiveState has been spun out of Sophos, might it be an opportunity to merge all those IDEs into one super bundle ?
007: "Who are you?"
Pussy: "My name is Pussy Galore."
007: "I must be dreaming..."
RIP BGI, BC++ 3.1, and Turbovision.
All great things for their day. Well, BGI (Borland Graphics Interface) never quite had the speed to do much, but everything they did was innovate. At least until the point where they stopped innovating, which was basically after Borland C++ 3.1. I have yet to see a comparable IDE. Turbovision was pretty cool, it was essentially the DOS equivalent to curses, and what they used to make their IDE.
I think M$ killed Borland with Windows95. It wasn't clear if they new how to make a better IDE for their OS, or if Borland just made a really crappy IDE. I remember it crashed a whole lot.
TurboPascal was something that transformed programming for me. Prior to that I'd mainly used IBM/Microsoft Basic and 8086 assembler. Suddenly having access to a fast compiler for a structured language, with good libraries and dirt cheap was a revelation. It's easy to take it for granted these days with GCC etc. but at the time TurboPascal was unequalled -- jeek
We had a Borland C compiler way back when I took C programming in college... I have fond memories. So long, old friend.
ConsultingFair.com
I did a simple little game in it, but to do something with scrolling and transparency I had to write my own procedure in in-line assembly.
I would love to see RedHat buy the whole IDE system and opensource it. Dephi was a great IDE to work on.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
They ignored the Open Source movement (Linux included) and hobby programmers. After Microsoft had beat them with Visual Basic, they could only keep their loyal market. What's after that? Death.
They should have followed Netscape's example and opensource their IDEs.
But no - instead, they decided to overinflate their prices, and well, the rest is history (pun intended).
Borland did this once before, when they acquired a bunch of middleware and database companies and announced that they were no longer the tools maker Borland — they were the Enterprise Software company, Inprise. The Enterprise stuff went nowhere, the IDEs continued to make enough money to keep the company afloat, and Inprise eventually admitted defeat and changed its name back.
Here's what will happen this time: the IDE business will be sold to some smart investor who knows that these tools have a loyal customer base. Borland will keep the name this time, and the spinoff will be called Delphiware or something. Without its reliable income stream from the IDEs, Borland with go bankrupt (or maybe just get dissolved, since they have a lot of cash), and Delphiware will buy the name back. And we'll be right back where we started — again.
Online Petition for Mark Shuttleworth, so we all can enjoy, port and improve the Borland programming tools
I would like to buy just the C family up until version 3, including Turbo C++ for Windows. I already bought it years ago, but there's nothing like perfectly commented source, as Borland themselves advocate in developer documentation! And it could teach me a thing or two about assembly...
This tagline was transcoded to result in at least one smirk. If you experience failure to smirk, please consult your Gen
I absolutely loved the early versions of Delphi. The manuals that came with it were long, involved, and brilliant. It was like being taken on a tour of what programming should really be like by about ten of the smartest guys in the business. Writing Object Pascal felt, much of the time, like writing poetry. The component library was clean and beautifully laid out. The IDE was super-responsive. And it could compile code faster than anything on the planet at the time. Back in the days of the 486, compile time really mattered, and being able to do 10,000 lines per minute on a 486-33 was extremely impressive. (hopefully I'm remembering my numbers correctly, it HAS been a very long time... it might have even been 100,000, but that seems too fast for a 486. Whatever the actual number was, it was, god, twenty times faster than anything else.) And a compiled Delphi program was just one EXE. No DLLs, no runtime, no dependencies, no distribution headaches... one EXE you could dump on a floppy and hand to someone. And the code was lightning-quick.
But then it started going in a strange direction... after Delphi 3, they decided to focus totally on database programming, and they ignored most of the other good stuff. And somewhere in that time frame, Microsoft swooped in and bought Anders Hejlsberg, the real brain behind Delphi. They correctly identified him as THE guy at Borland, and paid him a cool million in hard cash, upfront, to come to work for them. We are seeing the final results of losing Anders now. Without him at the technical helm, Borland entered into a long, slow decline. Delphi went off the rails, they forgot what was really great about it... it turned into a bloated mass of crud, focused on a tiny subset of the full universe of programming.
And then there was Kylix, which was an abortion if I ever saw one... what a horrible piece of software. I coughed up $1200 for the first Pro version because I was excited to see Delphi on Linux.... except it really wasn't. It looked like Delphi, but it didn't feel like it. It was still fundamentally a Windows program, with the minimum amount of effort needed to port things. Distributing a Kylix app was freaking impossible if you didn't already understand the Linux library system very intimately. There was nothing at all like the 'single-exe' feature, even though they made claims about 'easy distribution' on the box. And the documentation was terrible, just incredibly bad.
Seeing Borland die at this point would be more of a relief than anything; they have become a clueless company and haven't got a prayer of long-term survival. They have pissed all over everything they've ever done. You'd have to be an idiot to choose their software these days, between the freeware and the commercial alternatives.
For Microsoft, hiring Anders was a brilliant move; destroy a competitor for just one million dollars, pocket change from their standpoint. Anders worked on language recognition for awhile, but eventually he went back into compiler technology. He's the main brain behind this little language you might have heard of, C#.....
Borland getting out of IDE, Konica Minolta quitting cameras, what's next, Western Union stops sending telegrams?
I don't know in the US, or in other countries, but here in Brazil Borland is still relatively popular. For a long time, Borland had the lead on development tools. But since it started to fall apart, it never recovered, and it's just a shadow of what it once was. Many people blame Philippe Khan, others blame the subsequent CEOs and the whole Inprise imbroglio. But I prefer to look at it from a programmers perspective.
I started Turbo Pascal 2.0, on floppies. I remember seeing the ads on Byte Magazine. For anyone who tried Pascal on CP/M, or in USCD's implementation, it was a dream come true. And it was really fast! Later, I worked with all versions - from 3.0 to 5.5, and then Borland Pascal 6.0, with object orientation and Turbo Vision, a character based event-driven framework. I have the impression that Borland at that time tried too much, too hard; they tried to change paradigms, to change the way we programmed, but it was too big a change at once. But history does not stop here. Borland managed to get a lot of things wrong in a couple of years. Quattro was ok, but lacked the 'extra something' that made Borland special. Paradox was innovative for its time, but its stability was never something to write home about (IMHO, it managed to be worse in this respect than Access, and I'm giving my personal testimony on this). Borland even tried to run the clock backwards and sell a text processor named Sprint that I'm sure only the true dinossaurs around here will remember hearing about.
However, Borland still had some gas, and a new chance to get things right. A few years later, I got my hands on the Delphi 1 beta - it was a eighteen 1.44 floppy install, in a time when CDs were still far from popular. The quality of Delphi was amazing - they just got it right. But by then, VB had a small edge. For some reason, and for lots of small misteps, Borland gradually started to lose the lead.
I still can't get what happened around the whole Inprise situation. That they opensourced Interbase, just to close the source later, is something that I don't understand. They also got the pricing wrong. Borland always had the lead on low cost tools, but it started to charge one arm and one leg for a usable toolkit. The 'personal' editions were crippled, and missed some features that almost everyone needed (such as compiling ActiveX controls, or using the database controls in the library). It started to lose touch with the developers. The community (a vibrant one) started to look for other tools, just at the time when open source was starting to become mainstream.
By the way, even in the pre-Internet days, the community was amazing. One of the first popular software repositories in the Internet was Professor Timo Salmi's ftp.uwasa.fi. There were huge repositories of Pascal componentes, many of them in eastern Europe - Poland and Russia, for example. Borland could have amassed the power of the community, but for some reason, it largely ignored them. Students, once one of the strongholds of Borland penetration, were also ignored.
It's a shame that a company like Borland had to go this way. I personally would prefer that the ALM division was divested with a new name, so that Borland, the company, could be allowed to die with dignity. Perhaps a new structure - a Borland Foundation perhaps (borland.org anyone) - could pick the bones to start again. But I fear that's too late, even for that.
i find it very odd when people say 'do what netscape did'.
ok, have your main programmer quit, deliver late, get booted out of your parent company, and have the only reason anyone likes you because you 'arent microsoft'.
wonderulf business strategy
With their new focus on enterprise computing, they should change their name to something like Inprise.
All the descriptions I have read puzzle me. Why exactly would I use one of these ALM products? What do they do?
You need to discover Konqueror and Krusader. GMC, the Gnome Midnight Commander, is reasonably solid as well. With SFTP and decent underlying file systems, these programs leave their Windoze counterparts light years behind.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Indeed it's not new. Tons of companies (including IBM, Oracle, etc) do this (so only the big guys & corporations who need the extra high end features beyond the limitations pay $$$). But some people aren't happy getting 95% of the features of a product that costs several thousands for free, like the world owes them something, and every 50000$ program should be free - there just can't be anything in the middle. And since this is coming from microsoft (they're automatically bad and evil guys no matter what), then we must bash them no matter what!
STFU or wake the fuck up already. Thousands and thousands of developpers are using this nowadays (no need to buy visual studio - it DOES suffice for a huge portion of jobs - I've personally developped enterprise-grade n-tier apps in C# with it). It sure as hell beats having to pay thousands for visual studio for small to medium jobs. Not everything can be free (only in your little dream world with pink unicorns). Loads of people are perfectly happy to buy Visual Studio and more expensive tools. If anything they're allowing most people who can't afford it to still have great tools without resorting to piracy. Add some free 3rd party tools (nunit, nant, nhibernate, ndoc, mygeneration, cruisecontrol.net, testdriven.net, fxcop, etc) and you got an absolutely amazing and legit dev platform for 0$ -- but somehow you still have something to complain about eh?
Some days you just can't win. Release WICKED dev tools (including a very good database too) for free and get bashed, or don't and still get bashed...
That smells like the steaming pile of dung that XTree for windows became.
:)
This is FAR better
http://farmanager.com/
Specifically, US patent 5,628,016 on structured exception handling. This patent is preventing the Wine, ReactOS, GCC and MingW people from supporting exception handling that is compatible with the Microsoft implementation.
I'm pretty skeptical of this new area of business for Borland, but we'll see how it goes.
But I suspect the IDE business was a loser proposition anyway. Pascal is headed towards its death throws (not yet, but it's headed there). Java is still growing, but IBM killed the market by releasing Eclipse for free. C++ is stagnant at best, and in decline at worst. Besides which, Microsoft has used its predatory practices to grab too much of that market. Postgres and MySQL have killed Borland's database ambitions and JBoss has killed their application server ambitions.
I guess you could say that Borland is in large part a victim of open source. A pity in some ways, but inevitable.
http://groups.google.com/group/borland.public.delp hi.non-tec% 3Aborland.e n&
hnical/browse_frm/thread/9781ff657b80368a?q=group
public.delphi.*+author%3Adavidi%40borland.com&hl=
or
http://tinyurl.com/8hcek
Scroll down to post 4, it should have been the first but something happened with google's cache.
Summary:
They're looking to refocus the IDE tools group into a company that can focus on the tools and the developers. Also they're still working on the tools, same people nothing has changed, and it'll be sold to a company that shares their vision of moving forward with IDE development.
In fact, a few years ago, when Borland started giving away free downloads of their newest C++ compiler (command-line only), there were several places on the web that detailed how to integrate the new compiler with this IDE.
And their TASM product for DOS just rocked.
See this for more details about their objectScripting http://info.borland.com/borlandcpp/papers/scriptin g.html
Sniff... farewell my favorite IDE! (not that it got much attention these days anyways from Borland!)
Oi, Brasileiro,
You said, "I still can't get what happened around the whole Inprise situation."
That was frightening to see. But that's what happens when a technically oriented company has managers who don't understand technical things. They say they can manage, but they can't.
You need to listen to yourself typing.
Anders left for one simple reason - he was tired of working on Delphi/Object Pascal. He saw Java, wanted to go and work on a "Delphi for Java" (which became JBuilder) but Borland refused and said; "No.. you're the Delphi Guy". He replied; "No.. I'm the former Borland employee" and quit.
.NET guys - your guiding light in Anders failed.
Then he called Microsoft. And of course, MS was more than happy to snap him up. Since MS couldn't succeed in screwing over Java into their own image - they reinvented it as C# - nothing more than a pale immitation. Sorry
Now Blake Stone - the "JBuilder Guy" and later CTO, OTOH, while I'm sure Microsoft thought they were getting a good deal in hiring him. They didn't. I'm still not sure what that guy actually did for JBuilder (or for Borland) that was worthwhile other than be an example of what happens when you DO NOT practice good dental hygene.
JBuilder is now basically dead - replaced by "Peloton" (i.e. JBuilder on the SWT-based abortion from IBM known as Eclipse). While I like some things about Eclipse (like it's pricetag) the SWT-based approach just makes Eclipse so much garbage on non Windows platforms (like Linux) and downright unusable on the Intel-based MacOS. Nice job, IBM - you've succeeded in muddying the waters even *MORE* for Java as a viable desktop platform.
But I digress....
I miss the Borland of the Turbo Pascal days too. But they're long gone. In fact that company has been gone since just before they bought Paradox.
Polymorphism -- It's what you make of it.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I think that these days strong competition is killing quality software. Companies cannot afford to implement a good product, even if they know how to do it. It is too expensive. The games producers are a good example. Borland may be another good example. .Net, Vista, ...).
There are some companies who can afford too loose in the first phase (like Microsoft) and win later (think about XBox,
Most programmers will be happy to write good software but not with insane deadlines and insane managers. So I think is not a knowledge problem.
It's been 23 years. I think Mr. Kahn bought Turbo Pascal from Anders Hejlsberg.
I've never seen any evidence that Mr. Kahn understood technical things. No one who understood much about programming would have thought Ed Esber's Ashton-Tate was worth $440,000,000. Apparently Kahn got lucky when he hired Anders Hejlsberg, who does know what he's doing.
When Hejlsberg gave in to his dark side, Borland was left without a technical head, and has been confused ever since.
Note this biography of Philippe Kahn. I imagine that it is biography-speak, and Mr. Kahn does not have technical knowledge.
I've been using Delphi since version 1.0, and I just upgraded from D6 to D2006 (first upgrade I've taken in several years). I've a lot of code and expertese wrapped up in the product.
:-). But it is just possible that Delphi could be turned around. Despite being in decline for many years now it does still have a loyal following and a vast established user and resource base with interest in everything OpenGL to hard-core Database work. With the 2005/2006 releases that work on .net it has at least overcome the next major technical hurdle. It's also still one of the fastest environments to develop code in.
My initial thought was that language transfers never work (the ghost of Ashton-Tate haunts us yet
Unfortunatly the same cannot be said for the rest of the portfolio. JBuilder is dead by comparison with Eclipse and C++Builder and C#Buillder have never got off the ground with an established user base.
What's needed is a smaller, hungy, lean and technological company to take on Delphi and aggressively develop it in a way it's not been done by Borland for many years - someone like JetBrains or Metrowerks. The hobbyist/small developer market needs to courted aggressively again - that's after all how Borland grew on the back of TurboPascal and it's just as valid now as it's ever been. After all, if Delphi has survived to the extent it has, despite Borland's total management incompetance for the last few years (ever since the Inprise fiasco) then with good management the product has every chance of thriving again.
Kiss of death would be a large company adding it to their portfolio. Sun, IBM, Novell, Oracle or the like where the product would be just one item of many and the development talent leached.
So we'll see. Personally I'll be reluctant to start any new code on my shiny new D2006 until we know where we're going. Wait and see with fingers crossed.
Yes, you are correct, Visual Studio became definitely superior.
However, I am sure the fact that Borland pre-empted Microsoft with a graphical IDE, was a strong incentive to accelerate the development of VS.
Speaking of the importance of IDEs, I'm sure the demise of OS/2 is not unrelated to the piece of crap that C-Set was (ca. 1995). Imagine an IDE that displays code in proportional font by default; where you can't compile from the editor; has no Resource Workshop for designing dialogs.
Slashdot entertains. Windows pays the mortgage.
...those lifecycle tools were made options for Websphere development and became a big money-maker for IBM's "IDE Business".
And with IBM now giving away their base IDE, it seems Borland wants to go in the same direction.
IBM bought Rational Software for their LIFECYCLE tools, and makes money selling them as Eclipse/WSAD integrations.
Far as I can tell, they are copying this model: Ditching the OLD IDEs, and standardizing on the goodies (much of it better than Rational's) that they got through their acquisition of Together-J.
So it will be Borland's lifecycle moneymakers competing against IBM's lifecycle moneymakers, all on the Eclipse platform. I think Borland management smells weakness in what IBM has done to the Rational product line (for example, the way they balkanized and blinkered their UML tools).
This will be interesting.
If they sell their IDE tools to someone who can market them properly, maybe more people will begin to use them. Perhaps we'll even see a "Delphi Express Edition."
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
What's left of Borland after they sell off their IDEs? And, on a related note, why did Metroworks get rid of Codewarrior for the Mac/PC? Aren't the IDEs the crown jewels for these companies? Or are they being crushed by Microsoft Visual Studio on one side and OSS IDEs on the other?
To the best of my knowledge, Novell is the only major OS vendor that never supplied its own IDE/Compiler to its developer channel [which, to this day, I believe to be the primary reason their channel vanished to basically nothing, at least prior to the Mono/SuSE purchases].
Back in the day, you had to hack the Watcom compiler to death [using a bunch of undocumented, semi-mythical hacks that only the wizards had access to] just to get it to build a NetWare VLM/NLM. And that was the preferred method of developing for the platform.
Boy, I tell you, Novell, with Directory Services, a SuSE kernel, and Mono Web Apps, all brought together for the developer in a single, integrated Borland or Metrowerks IDE, would start to resemble a serious platform.
Or at least a platform that [finally] deserved to be taken seriously.
The best free c++ ide on windows (dev-c++ or dev-cpp) is made with delphy (yes) (uses mingw as compiler)
I remember the days Borland C++ V4 for windows landed on the doorstep, it had a big yellow sticker on top with the following: "WARNING THIS IS A HAEAVY BOX", no bloody kidding, it was like someone had just raided the local library, it was loaded with manuals. (not tomention the 40 odd floppies with the software).As I write this I'm still waiting for the Microsoft PWB that came with M$C 6.0 to finish initialising... aaahhh the memories.
You never catch me alive
Delphi has been a consistent revenue source for Borland since it was introduced. But they have shareholders that demand growth and, well, IDEs can only get you so far. Philippe Kahn did great things for Borland, but decided he would go head to head with Microsoft and create a Borland Office suite. He was soon fired for those moves. Then Borland got Del Yocam in the late 90s. He was the freakin' genius responsible for the "Inprise" name change and started the trend toward the "Enterprise Developer." Borland got greedy and began to alienate the Average Joe developer more and more.
Del's impeccable team forced the Delphi 4 timeline and the embarrassing ensuing patches. In fact, it occured to me the other day that the Delphi releases are kind of like the Star Trek movies. Star Trek 2, 4 and 6 were OK. The odd numbers notsomuch. Conversely, Delphi 4, 6 and 8 (aka Delphi 2005) had serious quality problems. Like many developers, I simply passed on these releases--even after purchasing them. But Delphi 5, 7 and 9 (aka Delphi 2006) are pretty damn good. The team recently posted a roadmap http://bdn.borland.com/article/0,1410,33383,00.ht
So now Borland is going to divest the developer tools portion of the business. http://www.borland.com/us/company/news/Tod_Nielse
IMHO, Delphi still packs a punch. Some of the things often overlooked about Delphi:
- Source code. C'mon, everything but the compiler itself is included in every release.
- You can write anything (in Windows). Lightweight cmd line EXE, Win Service, CGI, GUI, DLL, n-tier AppServer, 3D game
- Fast compiler. I still can't believe the difference when compared to a similar sized C app. sheesh
- Object Pascal language. Don't sneer. It's readable. Your kid could comprehend much of it.
- Tons of free code, utilities, libraries, components. Others langs have this. Delphi does too
- Clear path to
.NET for existing code with the VCL
Obviously, that sounds like a commercial, but I'm surprised how often people gloss over or completely miss some of these things.I've looked at lots of other languages like Java, PHP, Ruby (even Rebol!) and keep coming back to Delphi. Sorry, but I just find C too ugly... Anders certainly carried over a lot of his influence to C# though. Try comparing a Delphi interface section to a C# interface section. DEJA VU!
Delphi works well for me. It makes me money. It helps me make millions of dollars every year for my company. I sincerely hope that Borland can buck the trend of other companies and spin off a developer tools company with focus.
Have you ever tried powerful graphical editors like gedit or kate? They're great for working on small amounts of code, and are quite configurable. Of course, if you're already a wizard with vim or emacs, there's no reason to switch. But they do offer a lot.
I wonder what the price tag of these picees of software will be. Probabably beyond what's feasible to raise.
One can only imagine the impact that an open source Delphi or C++ Builder would have. It'd be a nice gesture given the loyal developers who stuck with Borland. I still haven't found a C++ RAD tool as efficient as Builder.
..don't panic
But a colleague at work said, "No, it actually is a good product", I dropped what I was using at the time: would you believe RR Software's subset Ada compiler? Turbo Pascal changed all of that, and I never looked back.
That colleague who turned me on to TP later defected to Matlab. I am seriously looking at Java/Swing/Netbeans these days. Neither the compile-side or the runtime performance are anywhere near Delphi, but hey, Moore's Law and all of that so it doesn't matter anymore.
I could never get the hang of Microsoft tools for developing ActiveX controls -- I have done toy examples in ATL and don't want to even think about MFC. My biggest gripe is that COM interface development doesn't round-trip -- once you develop an interface using the wizards (gosh I hate that word for those lame tools) you are pretty much stuck. The wizards create so much code in so many places of "you-can't-touch-that" code, that if you need to change an interface, you may as well crumple the sheet into a wad, toss into wastebasket, and start fresh.
Delphi has a pretty good Type Library editor for fine tuning COM and ActiveX interfaces -- of course interfaces are cast in stone when you let them out, but I like to make changes to interfaces when developing a new library. Type Library editor does a pretty good job of allowing one to add to or edit COM or ActiveX interfaces -- the updates to your code are a sometime thing, but there are not too many places you need to change and the compiler error when something doesn't change automatically also help.
There is one serious flaw in Delphi-developed ActiveX controls -- they won't serve up events with the Python ActiveX support, with Matlab 7, and with any other system that does multiple registrations of event listeners on a control. I have a really ugly patch for this at http://www.medsch.wisc.edu/~milenkvc/pdf/multieven t.htm.
There is one big shortcoming to Delphi -- collection classes. C++ has the STL, Java has its collection classes, Python is a set of collection objects masquerading as an object system. The built-in collection types in Delphi are sparse and are wired into major parts of the VCL (you can't do a console app or a straight Windows API app and use those collection types without folding in a lot of VCL code). Collection classes built-in to the language/library instead of programmers rolling their own linked lists, hash tables, etc. are the vogue, and Delphi hasn't kept up.