June 1, 2006
Life after Borland (Allen Bauer on Bitwise Magazine)
As Nick noted, Bitwise Magazine has published an interview with Allen Bauer covering a lot of the past, present, and future of Delphi and other (ex-)Borland tools. I could not refrain from pointing it out and underline many relevant tidbits of information:
- "Delphi for .NET is able to leverage many features ... in MSIL (or CIL) that C# doesn't even take advantage of" (in other words, C# in not the only and ultimate .NET programming language). The interview has actual examples...
- DevCo is starting to plan a smooth transition to 64 bits (first on .NET, later native). It is also looking into getting the most power from dual core machines, pushing on threading (and I guess this is mostly for native apps, but could be wrong).
- "I’ve never regretted our foray into Linux", good to hear... there might still be some live in Kylix.
- They are looking to Ruby and many other programming languages and related technologies (including LINQ, functional languages, aspect programming, declarative pre- and post-conditions...), one of the goals being to evolve the Delphi language. Great to know!
- Emerging markets, including the open source ones, are opportunities for a company for developers, and Delphi has a history of collaborating with open source projects (he mentions JEDI and Indy, I'd add FastCode and FastMM).
So let's keep our fingers crossed they can execute as soon as possible and start turning these ideas into actual projects, and do keep an eye on Allen's blog.
5 Comments
Delphi and Indy
Kent, from my personal experience I have to disagree. I'm using Indy (mostly 8 and 9) in many projects, including some of the core stuff that runs this blog, and have never had big problems. It is true taht they are terrible in backwards compatibility (particularly at the low level) and that Indy 10 does have troubles, which is one of the reasons Delphi keeps including both 9 and 10 alongside.Comment by Marco Cantù [http://www.marcocantu.com] on June 1, 23:38
Life after Borland (Allen Bauer on Bitwise Magazine)
Marco, just two examples: the component to decode rfc822 messages fails with an "uneven size in decode stream" error with some mail messages in Indy 9.x. A simple patch has been submitted, and in my test without bad side effects. For unknown reasons, it was never applied to the code. It is not a "minor failure". It hinder messaga processing when the "wrong" message is received. We almost lose some customers due to it. Another example is the IMAP4 component. At the end of 2003 we found out it was unable to work correctly with Exchange, due to some differences that did not break the RFC anyway. When we told them, we got the answer "the guy who wrote it had no Exchange server to test with". The code was too complex - or better - bad written - to be fixed easily, so we had to find better ways to do what we needed. If it was a small one-man library found somewhere in the web I could have understood, but it was the TCP/IP library *sold* with Delphi! Probably low level components like sockets works well enough, but high level ones don't. It's problem like those that had doomed Delphi in the past few years. The perceived value of the product greatly diminshed when the "new things" were just some third party library with quality issues. I have a lot of respect for the JCL/JCVL guys, and the FastCode project. Whenever we had a buh with JCL/JVCL and posted it to their defect tracking system we got a prompt reply, and it was fixed quickly.Comment by Kent Morwath on June 3, 00:33
The problem about Indy
I kinda agree with Marco, Indy is a great idea and a great project that is one of the main reasons we use Delphi, but I think the thing is community. Every succesful community project has grown rather slow and safe, but it loses its magic when it seems to be over controlled by some company or something else lucrative. Indy has grown but it always seems to have some problems that require knowledge beyond the community wide one. And they (the team) seek for (of course) the support services, books, help, etc. Some people involved in the main project expect to take economic advantage DIRECTLY from every issue, but mostly, indy has still some community/enterprise magic that give delphi some advantage.Comment by Salvador Gomez Retamoza [] on June 4, 04:22
Life after Borland (Allen Bauer on Bitwise Magazine)
I am trying to install Indy 10 for delphi .net & send an authenticated e mail message.I just could not even install the source.When i asked for advice from Indy expert team,it was not forthcoming at all & they asked me to refer FAQ. There is not even any help file which tells how to install the Dev snap shot. It is written in delphi but the installer is only available for VS.More over the attitude of the Indy team B members is the most indifferent compared to any Borland news group. I think Borland should buy out Indy & put its resopurces behind itComment by Venkatesh [http://venksateshvt.com] on July 6, 17:12
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Delphi and Indy
Comment by Kent Morwath on June 1, 13:29