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Section :: interviews

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CodeGear - Delphi, JBuilder and Beyond...

Developments in Development Tools
Friday 11 April 2008.
 

The last couple of years have seen a great many changes for CodeGear - not least the name! The company that I knew for so many years as ‘Borland’ has been reborn as a new company with a new name but it is, nonetheless, owned by the old company with the old name. Just in case you missed these developments I should explain that Borland - the company that I have always associated with developer tools - has transformed itself into a company that specialises in mysterious acronyms such as ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) and SDO (Software Delivery Optimization) - terms which, in my ignorance, I must confess mean next to nothing to me. Meanwhile, the ‘real’ Borland - the Borland that gave the world a range of fast ‘Turbo’-branded compilers and the ‘Visual Pascal’ Delphi language - has now condensed into CodeGear.

What exactly are CodeGear doing right now? That’s what I wanted to find out when I spoke to CodeGear’s Jason Vokes (EMEA Senior Director Sales & Marketing) and Jon Harrison (Lead Technical Evangelist and Product Manager for Java products). I should say that the one thing we didn’t talk about (at my request) was CodeGear’s Ruby On Rails IDE, 3rd Rail. This is due, quite simply to the fact that, as a developer of a competing IDE, Ruby In Steel, I have a clear conflict of interest. You should read into that omission nothing (pro or con) about that product.

One of the major new releases from CodeGear is JBuilder 2008, the second Eclipse-based version of its Java IDE. The big new feature CodeGear are pushing in this is something called ‘application factories’. Which are, what exactly...?

“The idea,” according to Jon Harrison, “Is that an application factory gives you a set of pre-built modules. Say, for example, you are developing an e-commerce application and you need to add a specific bit of functionality, such as a shopping basket. In the latest JBuilder, you can open up an application factory ‘perspective’ and this will show you shopping cart module which will let you preview the functionality and also the appearance - what the screens will actually look like.

“Application factories will also help end users to package up their own code into the same sort of reusable modules - both generating the code and configuring the perspectives.”

Another major addition to JBuilder is a new visual Swing designer. It turns out that this is, in fact, a third-party tool developed by Instantiations. Jon Harrison admits that the visual design capabilities of the first Eclipse-based release of JBuilder were “not as good as we wanted”, and believes that the new offering is a significant improvement.

It’s not only Java that’s getting new tools. The second version of the controversially-named Delphi For PHP (controversial to those of us who thought that Delphi either meant a specific language or a specific IDE - neither of which forms a part of Delphi For PHP) will soon be released. This is a visual design and coding environment for PHP. I am told that version 2 will feature a significantly improved editor and form designer plus some new design capabilities for HTML pages. It will also have enhanced database connectivity which will support Oracle, SQL Server and others.

So what of Delphi? I mean, the real Delphi - the one that I’ve been programming for over a decade? The official name for this is now RAD Studio and this comes in various ‘flavours’ which may include one or both of the Delphi (Object Pascal) and C++ languages. The next major version is code-named Tiburon and is scheduled for release in the ‘second half’ of 2008.

The focus of Delphi has varied somewhat in recent years. Not so long ago, it was being strongly targeted for .NET development to the extent that it even had a .NET VCL (Visual Component Library) which was broadly compatible with the Win32 VCL, thus easing the development and migration of applications between Win32 and .NET. The existing and forthcoming versions still have support for .NET but this is being rather downplayed these days. The current version, for example, only targets .NET 2.0 whereas Microsoft’s own compilers are now working with .NET 3.5. At any rate, it seems that CodeGear has concluded that the Win32 platform is alive and well and, having been largely deserted by Microsoft itself (with the end of the ‘classic’ VB product line, Microsoft’s only Win32 programming language is its rather ‘non-visual’ C++) presents a large development ‘niche’ which Delphi can fill nicely.

New features in Delphi ’Tiburon’ will include enhanced client-server development and a "totally rewritten" VCL which will be unicode enabled.

“There’s still a lot of native development going on,” Jason Vokes insists, “So that’s where we are playing to our strengths.”

I make no secret of the fact that Delphi is my preferred Win32 language/IDE/compiler. So I await developments with interest...

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