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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."
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!!
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
C# is not "native Windows app", it's .NET app. :) What library? MFC?
Ruby - what library gives you native windows UI (like, with XP themes, advanced Windows controls etc, for example?).
C++ - of course
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
Fairly certain that from MS's point of view, .Net apps are considered a "native Windows apps". You and I know this isn't necessarily the case in the wild, but I feel like quibbling this morning ;)
Well I'll admit to thinking it was a great idea when it got started. Back in the late 90s, there were polls about which applications people wanted for Linux. Two consistently topped the list: Quicken/Quickbooks and Delphi.
When they first announced its availability, at a price of a whopping $999 for the non-enterprise version, I immediately realized they didn't have a clue. No wonder almost no one bought it. When they announced that the price had dropped to $200, I ordered a copy immediately. It was nice, and I enjoyed playing with it, but it was somewhat buggy.
I also ordered the upgrade to Kylix 2. It had definite improvements, but it was still rather inconsistent, with a Winelib IDE, an infernal Motif based help system, and producing Qt applications. There was a lot of annoyance in the user community that the promised PostgreSQL driver was too long in coming.
When I switched from Red Hat to Gentoo, I never was able to get Kylix installed correctly. I haven't used it since.
I still believe there could be a market for this kind of tool -- if the company producing it actually came through with a great product that could produce apps for multiple platforms with minimal changes. Looks like Java or Python (take your pick) is the closest we're gonna get.
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.
I stick to Delphi 5, too. It isn't dead. I was pleased to find that it runs great in Wine, so I can even dump Windows and still support legacy stuff. By Delphi 5, Delphi did everything you could want the product to do - I never saw any reason to upgrade. Most of the later versions were just "enterprise" stuff that didn't have new features to make desktop apps. Delphi may have been a victim of its own success, because version 5 was a natural place to say "this is the stable version we're developing apps on!" and not upgrade.
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
But most Windows boxes have the .net runtime installed...
.NET 2.0, which you should be, since the 2005 IDE is light-years beyond 2003, and the new features of the language are well worth it IMO.
.NET Framework v2.0 or higher installed" when they run them.
You might be surprised. Especially if you're compiling for
Obviously as time progresses, more and more people will have it, but a lot of them still don't. I put a note in my readmes and on the download pages for the apps I've released publicly, and I still get people asking me why they get an error along the lines of "you must have the
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
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.