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Delphi Dumps Borland
Mail is pouring in about yesterday's announcement that Borland is going to sell off its IDE development products, the most important of which are Delphi and JBuilder. Read the story carefully; I think many may have it wrong: Borland isn't dumping Delphi; Delphi is dumping Borland. David Intersimone, who's been with Borland for over 20 years, is going with the IDE products to some new and as-yet undertermined spinoff. I have a sense that wherever David I. goes, the true spirit of Borland goes, whether under that name or not.
What will nominally remain under the Borland name is "application lifecycle management," or the sort of thing that most of us old-school developers call "a subscription for the beating of dead horses." IBM is good at this, and it's tough to think that Borland can just walk in and take a bite out of IBM's lunch. Besides, whothehell cares? If a handful of managers walk off into the sunset babbling about application lifecycles, we'd be well rid of them. A brand without the products that created the brand is about as useful as an empty cereal box, as Borland's management will eventually discover.
Everything depends on what sort of organization picks up Delphi and its lesser brothers. A small, savvy group of developer/investors could strip out some of the crud from Delphi 2005, cut the price by about 75%, and own the Win32 code generation market again. (I'm less sure how viable JBuilder is, since I don't use it.) There's a lot of room for new, highly integrated IDE products. Something as visual as Delphi and capable of creating strict model-view-controller Web apps using both Delphi's frameworks and other technologies like Ruby and Rails, or Java and Struts, would be killer, and I don't think anything like that exists yet. I'm currently creating very simple Ruby/Rails apps, and as good as the technologies are, using them means manually managing a horrible mess of disconnected text files, which is precisely what an IDE is supposed to do.
I'm less sure of how much impact AJAX will have on the development market, but AJAX definitely needs an IDE to pull together the various disconnected technologies that now have to be knit together by hand. Delphiware Corp. (or something else meaning Delphi emptied of Borland's missteps) could own the AJAX market with the right product.
So let's look at it from the correct perspective: Borland was killing Delphi. Getting rid of Borland is probably the best thing to happen to Delphi since Win32. Life is not about screwing around with application lifecycles. Life is about making code happen. Let's hope that Delphi's new masters (whoever they turn out to be) have that motto carved on the doorframe.
The Blender alternative
Of course, perhaps David I. is the one that needs convincing here?
(Incidentally, JBuilder is kind of an also-ran in the Java IDE market right now; good open-source solutions exist in the form of NetBeans and Eclipse, and commercial competitors like Oracle JDeveloper and IntelliJ IDEA own a large portion of what's left of that market.)
Re: The Blender alternative
Re: The Blender alternative
I wonder if the "new Delphi company" would restart Kylix development along with Delphi...Kylix 3 is still popular in some circles, I'm told, even though Borland has officially moved it to the "classic products" section of their Web site. There might be enough of a market there.
(Oh, and after looking into the JBuilder issue further, it seems Borland was working on a completely new version of JBuilder that was to be based on Eclipse. That may go with the rest of the IDE stuff, or, for all I know, they might just contribute that back to the Eclipse project.)
(Anonymous)
Wouldn't it be lovely
: Bat :
Interesing perspective.
It's good to see that you're still keeping an eye on the developments surrounding Delphi.
Allen Bauer.
Delphi/C++Builder/C#Builder
Chief Scientist, Borland Software Corp.
Re: Interesing perspective.
The key point in my view is that ALM is not what made Borland famous, nor I think what it does best. Without good ways of generating code, there's no computing. None. Zip. Nobody generates code like Borland. I don't want to see the ALM part of the business eclipse or bog down the IDE part. So the parting of ways is good; I would have preferred seeing the name go with the compilers. You say "Borland" and nobody thinks "ALM." They think "Delphi" or "JBuilder." The important thing is that the two parts of the business go their own ways.
By the way, I not only follow Delphi, I use it for all my Win32 work. I'm not entirely sure what would ever pull me away in the native-code Win32 world. Delphi had it right from V1.
Re: Interesing perspective.
Yes, that is the unfortunate thing about all this. However, from my perspective it is all about the tools regardless of what the surrounding corporate name happens to be. If the loss of the Borland name is what has to happen in order for the Delphi/C++Builder products to attain autonomy and flourish, then I'll count it all as a net gain.
The good thing is that both sides of the businesses will be given the opportunity to live and die on their own merits. It was clear that with a split focus nobody was going to win. So the good thing is that all the parts that made Borland famous go along with the spin-off. It is only the name that is lost.
I have more comments here: http://blogs.borland.com/abauer
Allen Bauer.
Chief Scientist, Borland Software Corp.
Delphi/C++Builder
(Anonymous)
Hi Jeff - thank you for the article
David I - Borland
Re: Hi Jeff - thank you for the article
(BTW, on the top shelf in my office bookcase here are the print manuals for TP 1, 3, 4, and 5.5, plus Turbo Modula 2. The TP 2 manual vanished when I moved to Arizona in 1990. My Delphi manuals, of course, are within arm's reach.)
Re: Hi Jeff - thank you for the article
I couldn't help finding a reference in a livejournal posting to a turbo modula 2 (cp/m) manual sitting on someone's shelf. I have found the software to be labeled "abandonware" and available freely on the net. To use the software however, a manual is required. I would be eternally grateful if you or indeed anyone capable, would post this document in machine readable format. I would also, naturally, be interested in obtaining the original item. :)
Many Thanks,
Dave Williams (reallydave@mail.com)
(Anonymous)
Re: Hi Jeff - thank you for the article
Turbo Modula-2
I still have the software (on a 5 1/4" floppy) and an original manual, and in fact somewhere in the mess downstairs I still have a 2-drive Little Board CP/M machine that I built in 1988 specifically to run Turbo Modula. The manual, unfortunately, has gotten very brittle, and scanning it would completely destroy it.
One suggestion: The cousin of Turbo Modula-2 became TopSpeed Modula-2 under Jensen & Partners, and if a TopSpeed manual could be found somewhere, parts of it would almost certainly be applicable. Clarion bought TopSpeed years ago, and I don't know what they ever did with it, if anything.