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Borland/Codegear Doesn't Plan to Revive Kylix
An anonymous reader writes "Borland's tools spinoff, CodeGear, is laying plans to revive the classic developer products — but Kylix is staying dead, the CEO says. "I hear lots of discussions about Kylix, but I didn't see lots of revenue in my reports about Kylix," he told CRN."
first post woohoo
Delphi(till version 6) and Kylix were great tools, despite all the bugs and the damned impossible price.
The Army reading list
When Borland was investigating if Kylix was a viable product they did a poll betweenBorlands users. The poll gave an incredible 94 (or something similar) percents of the votes with people entusiasthically screaming: "Yes, we will get Kylix" "Cool, now I can code for Linuzzz". When the product was done and out there, only some miserable number of copies were sold. That was one of the problems: the Linuzzz crowd has a natural dislike for non-free products.
Borland (maybe Inprise back then) made then a move: made it free, but only if the code produced with Kylix would be GPL. Then the user base rised kind of, but many Windows coders realised that linuzz is not Windows and the dependence nightmare began. Borland was obligated to support only 2 distros (IIRC) because they could not guarantee that the rest of the distros would have the needed dependences.
Add to this that the IDE crashed badly, and here we have. A big flop.
Another problem was that VCL applications were no more, and you must use CLX which was somekind of a bastard for a Delphi user....Oh well....
There is actually a very interesting project that allowed programming in Windows with Delphi but deploying in Linux in a semiautomatical way... Forgot the name of the project but it was kind of officially supported by Borland.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
Delphi is dead. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Does that surprise anyone? I love Delphi, I've used it since the beta of version 1 (without upgrading from Delphi 5 till Delphi 2006 though) - but the moment they announced Kylix it seemed obvious to me that it was a bad idea and doomed to fail...
The high price (for the "usable" version) when they released didn't help. A pricy tool for developers used to free tools, with its greatest strength being the GUI system and components on a system most used server-side...
I understand it was a bit buggy, too, though that is hearsay - I never used it.
I've also heard quite a few complaints from Delphi component developers, such as Developer Express. Some of them spent quite a bit making components for Kylix and felt that Borland let them down when they lost interest.
The Linux crowd has a natural dislike for products that don't work well and cost money. We've little issues with paying money for things that work right. Kylix was a feeble attempt on Borland's part, done far, far too late to make any difference in things.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Straight from the nobody-gives-a-shit department.
nothing
For those of us who haven't used Kylix before, what IS Kylix?
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
At the time of the release it was not like there was much potential of a big revenue stream from the nix crowd to begin with. Who was the target audience? Lone developers that would have used it to build "free" apps. couldn't afford it, and corporate dev. shops that were using nix were only using it on the back end. So at best you are building middle tier or web services, both of which were already well supported by other languages/platforms for nix.
.NET train because that was where the money "is/was" but now instead of innovating, they play catch up for the privilege of being dependent on someone else's technology.
There were functional problems as well. Making Delphi/CBuilder developers not use the controls and code base for win32 but requiring the use of CLX and custom libs for Kylix portability. An unstable initial IDE release. To name a few. Developers that work in Delphi or CBuilder all the time think in those languages, and know all the details (hidden features/bugs) of the controls they use. The compiler/linker should have taken care of the different platforms. Like compiler options that determine if you are compiling against win32 or nix. Making the developers try and remember all the differences is the same as making them learn a new language. Thats just dumb, and if there is one thing developers tend not to be it's dumb.
Now if you come forward to today where Desktop nix is starting to make headway. What would be really interesting is if there were a stable version of Kylix that let you use your Delphi or CBuilder code, (not CLX and custom libraries for nix.) and the compiler/linker took care of the platform specifics. Price it around the same as the Turbos. You have a good viable product. ["Of course if wishes were horses we would all be eating steak"]
I don't think Borland/CodeGear has the courage to do this. Because while the website says "Where developers matter" what it really means is "Where developers pocketbooks matter". Just look at the sad state of the BDS products. Borland hopped on the
I could rail all day on mistakes Borland made, but as they say hindsight is 20/20. Let's not focus on the past but look forward to the future and all the mistakes they have yet to make.
Funny this story breaks after I spend all morning getting Delphi 5 to run under WINE, to support a legacy app that was written back when Delphi 1 was an exciting new thing.
Watching Delphi die horribly was sad. Delphi originally did one thing very, very, VERY well - it was a rapid development platform to make GUI apps in Windows very fast, that you could distribute as standalone applications that ran very fast. No VBXes or vbrun.dll. I knew Delphi was doomed when Borland changed the defaults to NOT create a standalone app. "They just don't get it." Then version after version took Delphi away from its mission. Delphi was not going to work as an enterprise database tool, an Active X control construction tool, a .NET language, etc. That wasn't why Delphi faithful liked it. Borland just didn't get what made Delphi great. Plus the price became outrageous with all this "enterprise" nonsense.
So ...
Why not open source Kylix/Delphi? Linux has no real rapid GUI development tool. Let real developers fix whatever is wrong with it. See if anyone uses it. After all, Turbo Pascal is as dead as dead can get.
Kylix had lots of problems. I was one of the many excited when it was offered and became available -- that is until I downloaded and installed it. The out-of-date library requirements (almost from time of release) for installation, the unstable environment that was not responsive or would crash from time-to-time, the wine requirement. Couple that with an extremely expensive price tag.
Borland/Inprise got greedy, plain and simple. They tried to charge a premium price for products on Linux. Had they done any amount of "real" research they would have understand that was not going to fly. I'm not saying there wasn't a market for non-free tools -- I think they could have made some great inroads had the priced and marketed Kylix properly. I remember being highly surprised at the high price of the "enterprise" version. Of course, they also charged a hefty premium for Delphi enterprise as well. I don't recall if Delphi and Kylix were the same price, it seems as though Kylix was noticeably more.
Couple Borland's history of quality software, and an expectation of excellence from their loyal customers, with the quality of Kylix, the looming disaster was obvious. I tried Kylix 1 and Kylix 3. I don't know anything about 2. Kylix 1 always felt like it was more of an alpha or beta release when I used it, not a finished released product. You are not going to win any friends charging a premium price for something like that.
The sad thing is, I have a gut feeling (pure opinion, not backed by hard facts) that the back end of Kylix was probably pretty decent. It was as though they were spending so much time getting the back end compiler part working perfectly that they ran out of time for the IDE and had to take shortcuts to get it out. Kylix may have been a technical marvel on one-hand, but the part that people actually saw and used on a day-to-day basis left a bad impression. Especially for the price.
Instead of learning their lesson and adapting to the market, they blame the Linux market for being unwilling to buy non-free tools or make other excuses. When, in reality, had the product they offered lived up to the expected quality of Borland's products, and been sold at a reasonable price, my guess is they would have been much more successful.
. 62,400 repetitions make one truth -- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
I wrote some software in Delphi and was excited when Borland (Inprise) announced Kylix. In the end I purchased all the versions of Kylix that they released and none were up to production quality standards. They all had longstanding, known bugs that were never addressed. Eventually, I found the Lazarus project ( http://lazarus.freepascal.org/ ). While the debugging is not up to what I had with delphi, I am able to code in Linux on a project that other developers are developing in Windows. While we have found bugs and limitations, the developers are quick to fix problems that we find and/or suggest better ways to do things. Matt Henley
Delphi's demise was quite predictable with simple datamining techniques.
p hiDejanews.png
http://www.realmeme.com/Main/miner/technology/del
I was the subject of a great deal of hostility from the Delphi community when I posted this prediction back in 1999. I loved Delphi, it was the best tool I've ever used but you'd think that "rational engineers" could distinguish between personal feelings and market forces.
There was clearly demand for a cross-platform version but Borland waited too long and java ate the window of opportunity.
CLX was kack. So I guess QT on windows was kack.
If only they used the wxWidgets wrappers, they would have platform native widgets underneath.
Lazarus is to me what Delphi used to be.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
Well I still use Delphi 6 (in my opinion the last decent and stable version that was worth using for any type of project). I tried some of the most recent versions (notably V7 and D2005) and was rather shocked at how the quality of the IDE's seems to have dropped. While D2005 did have some nice new features, it was buggy, crashed, and generally upset me a lot.
I still use Delphi6 and am quite happy with it. The Delphi newsgroups on the borland server are still fairly active so I certainly wouldn't say that Delphi is dead.
Kylix on the other hand... Interesting idea but it was always doomed right from the start. Linux is pretty much free for most distro's. Who in their right mind is going to pay major cash for a rapid GUI development tool for an OS that is completely free? - No-one. I never tried Kylix and quite honestly I never really had much interest in it either. Linux is rather complex by itself and the added agro of getting something large like Kylix to run wasn't something I wanted. In a way it's a shame that Borland didn't continue to push Kylix (at a cheaper or free price) because it would of also promoted the growth of linux. We all know though that the bean counters put a stop to it..
Linux needs a modern, stable, bytecode-based, object-oriented, cross-platform language and runtime. For Windows this is .NET. )Since this is Slashdot, 1000 people will poo-poo .NET by the time they make it to this sentence) The corporate reality is that C# .NET is replacing C++ as the standard language for enterprise development and GUI application development. As a language, C++ hasn't kept-up fast enough, and to turn C++ into a platform you need a whole variety of 3rd-party libraries. .NET is a one-stop solution and it is a joy to program in.
.NET. And Linux doesn't have a viable alternative. The current options I see are:
Now while everyone is talking about this being the year of the Linux desktop, I see companies moving away from standards and toward
Java
Mono
Kylix?
Each has limitations. Mono has/may have dangerous patent problems, and the Novell/Microsoft deal seems to confirm it. I'm not sure what Java's limitations are today, since I abandoned it a decade ago. Kylix was supposed to be the solution. It had the ease of VB, the cross-platform power Qt, and the power and elegance of C++. But today the VB IDE is considered anemic, Windows Forms is better integrated into the IDE than Qt, C# has integrated most of the good features of C++, and bytecode compilers are 70% of native speed which is good enough.
They have been hived off by Borland since there were no buyers.
Borland have already sacked 120 staff in the last month since they are losing millions.
Expect to see them shut down within 18 months.
Dropping Kylix is a pretty good decision, Linux has no future anyway [Ducks and covers!]
It's a shame a lot of developers are leaving Delphi, its's still a fine language (probably the best for Windows RAD) and well supported, and as long as there is a Windows API it can still produce a single executable that will run fine on anything from Windows 95 to Vista. I personaly have no plans to move but (unfortunately for Codegear) nor do I have any to upgrade.
Boz
BozNZ - Simple solutions to complex problems
www.boznz.com Simple solutions to complex problems.
I agree that Linux needs a modern, stable, bytecode-based, object-oriented, cross-platform language and runtime. For Windows this is .NET. The corporate reality is that C# .NET is replacing C++ as the standard language for enterprise development and GUI application development. If I knew this in advance, I would save my time by investing more on C#. As a language, C++ hasn't kept-up fast enough, and to turn C++ into a platform you need a whole variety of 3rd-party libraries. .NET is a one-stop solution and it is a joy to program in.
Ozgur Uksal
http://www.wikipedia.org/
Lazarus is the new Kylix!
Why even use Delphi any more? All Lazarus needs is proper documentation and some tutorials to be written, and then everyone who used Kylix can port to Lazarus and avoid Delphi.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
So they are renaming it "Killix"?
Table-ized A.I.
Funny, but the Hungarian Kylix site is hacked for more than one year. The page is full of text "Hacked By Milli-islam.OrG". Nobody cares at Borland.
I know a fellow doing C++/MFC, but that seems like an exercise in masochism, even for C++ programming. The official Microsoft Way was that mere mortals program in VB and that real guru types produced the ActiveX controls that were assembled in applications by VB, and you can do the same thing using Matlab or even Python (assembling apps in a scripting environment using ActiveX controls implemented in C++ using MFC or ATL).
But none of these methods are pure native. I have been using Delphi - I have used it with my home-grown GUI framework, with the VCL, and to produce and to use ActiveX controls. I had also been taught Pascal (from Brinch Hansen no less!), so while I consider the Pascal begin-ends so 1970's and a little clumsy in syntax, I have not approached Delphi with the kind of Pascal aversion that keeps others away from it.
So in the end, there is nothing perfect for the Win32 API -- you can do C and the giant switch statement in the style of Petzold, you can engage in the masochism of C++ and what passes for object-oriented programming and frameworks in the MFC/ATL world, you can have the convenience and power of VB 6 but then you have to deal with an archaic bastardized language (Basic), or you can have the convenience, power, and native code of Delphi, and you have to deal with (from the perspective of people from the outside looking in) with a bastardized dialect of Pascal, which was never a favorite in the programming profession, the power and added features of the Delphi dialect of Object Pascal notwithstanding.
But the real reason Delphi is waning is that among the developer community, interest in programming for the Win32 API is waning. Really. One group of people has deserted the Windows API for Java. Another group has bought into Managed Code, WinForms, and C#. The biggest group has abandoned client apps altogether and concentrated on Web apps - for a lot of data entry/fill-in-the-blanks user interfaces, while Web apps are slow and clunky, they are apparently good enough and have all of the goodness of universal access over the Web. A final group is perhaps discouraged of developing client apps for Windows (developers, developers, developers, developers!) because whatever clever kind of shrink wrap app you developed will be Borged by Microsoft.
So Delphi is the best way (still) to do a native-mode Win32 API app, but the in house client app developers have forked into Java and C#, the people who want to reach a broader audience (along with in-house developers) have gone away from client and over to Web apps, and the folks who would be developing the next killer client app for Windows have been discouraged. If no one is developing native-mode Win32 apps, no interest in Delphi.
The sort of person developing on Linux probably came from a university Unix background and was comfortable with vi, emacs, make, makefiles, and the whole Unix style of software development. It is not clear that IDE's are of interest to the people already on Linux, let alone the stories on this thread about cost and bugs with Kylix. If the Linux world is to be sold on IDE's, it may come from Eclipse, but it wasn't coming from Borland for the cited reasons.
The real breakthrough would have been if Kylix could have brought the Delphi developer community over to Linux -- we are talking about people who have never used a command-line compiler, a makefile, or know how to use a text editor that doesn't support the old WordStar shortcuts. We are also talking about people used to paying for their programming tools. This could have been a path for bringing a whole crop of people away from Windows and over to Linux by supplying them with development tools in the style that they had become accustomed to.
One side of the equation was the cost and bugs of early versions of Kylix. The other side of the equation was that there were a ton of nagging compatibility issues between Windows and Linux about such things like file names and directory structures -- a lot of Delphi Windows developers who had heard how marvelous Linux was found that the differences were deeper than dir is called ls and copy is called cp. A Delphi developer looks at all the things they need to take care of in their code to get a Kylix version and decides to lie down until the feeling passes. The historical fact that numerous "Year of Linux on the Client" came and went to no effect was a factor in this lethargy - read Joel Spolsky about how porting your app to serve less than 10 percent of the market should take less than 10 percent of the total effort, and Kylix coupled with what was different about Linux was not a 10 percent solution.
A lot of people in the Linux world complain about Kylix costing money, being commercial and proprietary, not being in the spirit of Linux at so many levels. Borland is what made Microsoft tolerable as a development target to many developers -- think of the primitive state of development tools from MS pre and even post Turbo Pascal and Delphi. Kylix could have made Linux more tolerable as a development environment to more people -- in the Unix world there is this One True Way of C/C++, vi/emacs, make, and an OS with only one True Way, and I include pre-Borland Windows, is not much fun to work with.
Linux is breaking out of the One True Way with Python, Perl, Ruby, Java, Eclipse, and so on. Kylix could have opened an alternate path to software development and enriched Linux, but it didn't work out.
I actually was quite fond of Delphi 2 and tried to make my stuff compile on it as long as I could (I believe the Delphi 2 compiler ran much faster and Delphi started up faster than later versions). I also thought that Delphi 2 would be most compatible with FPC, but they are moving in a kind of Delphi 3 direction.
Which Delphi got a stable version of the TypeLib Editor for ActiveX development? I have ActiveX versions of all the VCL controls I have developed, and I am familiar with Delphi 6 and Delphi 3. The ActiveX development support in Delphi 3 was kind of in an early stage but quite mature by Delphi 6 -- I suppose what I want in Delphi 6 is also found in Delphi 5, but I only have Professional versions of 2, 6, and 7 and more limited versions of 4 and 5 along with access to 3 at the U.
One major difference between ActiveX and VCL: in Windows, and ActiveX is an ActiveX is an ActiveX, and it is pretty much upward and downward compatible between 98 through XP. On Delphi, your VCL's have to be compiled against every compiler version, and if you want to share or sell VCL's to people, you need to have the whole stable of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 on hand. If I want to sell you a VCL, I could build it on 2, 6, or 7, but I don't have 5, so I would have to be a nag and say my VCL requires 7 and since you are staying with 5, too bad. Java has similar version restrictions, although downloading J2SE is free (as in beer). Microsoft, bless their black little hearts, is amazingly upwards and downwards compatible between Windows versions.