The Lair of the Pythia

Everyone else seems to have had their say on the announcement of the sale of CodeGear to Embarcadero Technologies, so I guess I might as well chip in too. By far the most obvious thing about the announcement is that as from now CodeGear and its products will be owned by a company that thought it worthwhile to spend a lot of money on them, not by a company that is get to get rid of them. That has to be a good thing. Also I know where Embarcadero are headquartered, so if they don’t do what I want I can always saunter along to their building and complain. (And then go shopping in the Ferry Building afterwards to cheer myself up.)

On the other hand, as an independent developer, I confess to being somewhat nervous about the fact that the tools I use are now owned by a company that doesn’t have much of a track record of supplying products to people like me, and whose synergies with CodeGear pretty clearly lie in areas that don’t impact me. Whether this will prove a problem or not, time alone will tell, but at least something is finally happening.

This week’s topic for discussion around Delphi-related blogs will undoubtedly be the newly released roadmap. Most of this will doubtless center around technical features and will be of the “I want my new toys now (and other people can wait for theirs)” type, which is entirely understandable because everyone out there trying to make money out of software wants the best tools for their projects now. For me, the bleeding edge is not a great issue. The only development I’m really interested in is 64-bit, and I’m happy to wait on that while the hardware and O/S implementations sort themselves out.

What I am happy about, however, is the existence of a roadmap. A lot of people have tended to scoff and CodeGear’s worries about Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, and have even suggested that this is a smokescreen for not wanting to say anything. Those of us who have worked in regulatory economics know better. These days it is a really bad idea for a software company to go around making airy promises about new versions of their products unless they are pretty sure that they can deliver. So the fact that CodeGear has issued a roadmap suggests that they, their auditors, their lawyers and whatever consultants they might be using are all happy that it is safe to say the things they said. And that, in turn, makes Delphi’s future look a whole lot more safe and secure. (And if you have clients who are convinced that CodeGear will be out of business soon that’s a very good thing.)

One other thing worth noting is that is appears from what the roadmap says that Studio 2007 will have an upgrade path from Delphi 2007, and not be a separate product. It doesn’t exactly say that, and the small print warns about not using the roadmap as a basis for licensing decisions, but it does seem to imply it, which is encouraging.

I’ve steered clear of the debate over CodeGear announcing a new CEO because I don’t see any value in speculation and conspiracy theories. However, Jim Douglas has now started blogging and his first post contains some encouraging comments. I particularly like the fact that he mentions the “first experience”. Buying and installing CodeGear products can be rather depressing, and leave you wondering if the product itself is as bad as the buy/install/register process. This can be unfair, because the guys who write Delphi products are not necessarily the same guys who run the shop. Furthermore, if the shop and registration process are still managed by Borland rather than by CodeGear staff (or by third parties contracted to Borland) then it may need someone at Jim’s level in the company to get things put right. Here’s hoping Jim’s focus on this area bears fruit.

In his introductory presentation Nick Hodges got back onto his favorite theme about the Turbos being somehow a different animal from the Studio products. I think the message is pretty clear now that the Turbos are intended to be somehow cut down versions of the Studio. Even if they have very similar functionality now, they may not do so in the future. Equally I think that CodeGear now understands that if it wants Turbo users as customers then it has to treat them with respect and as part of the developer family. Not everyone who does programming works in a big software house, or indeed wants to.

Anyway, we now believe that there will be an upgrade path from the Turbos to the Studio products for the benefit of those people for whom the limitations of the Turbos become burdensome. (As I noted earlier, it may not be possible to buy that upgrade yet, but we’ve been promised it will be.)

But the question that has been nagging away at my mind is this: “What do Turbo customers want?” Or, to put it another way, what is a sensible way in which CodeGear can limit the functionality of the Turbos as compared to the Studio and not irritate people by making it seem that the Turbos are not not worth having?
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Back at Mike Pence’s blog today there is news that CodeGear is considering a product for Ruby on Rails. That’s very nice, but who the heck is this Ruby anyway? Ruby Wax? Nope, she’d be more likely to want to be off the rails, I think. A song by Donald Fagen? A new teenage pop star? I figured it was about time I found out.

Ruby, it turns out, is a relatively new programming/scripting language creating by a smart-sounding Japanese guy known as “Matz” (Yukihiro Matsumoto). Quite why it is so wonderful isn’t immediately obvious, but it is object-based, designed to be readable, and it has a garbage collector. This is all good stuff.

The Rails part is the database connection. And now you can start to see the interest from CodeGear. You have a strong object-oriented language with a powerful database backend. What does that sound like?

So far so promising. I suspect I’ll still be using PHP for a while, if only because this is a Wordpress blog, but given the level of interest shown I’m going to spend some time taking a closer look at Ruby. The main downside I can think of right now is lack of hosting options. If I wanted to use it I suspect I’d have to switch hosts. (Heck, Pair, who are otherwise wonderful folks, haven’t even put PHP 5 on general release yet.)

But for now, over to you folks. Any Ruby evangelists out there care to make a pitch?

So, there were two major announcements from CodeGear yesterday, but the information available was so confusing that I decided to wait until after today’s Delphi Hour before posting anything. Here’s what I think the situation is:
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The latest piece of news to come out of CodeGear is a post by Steve Shaughnessy of their database team about the latest connectivity work. I don’t pretend to understand all of the talk about “delegate drivers”, but the thing that caught my eye was this:

The dbExpress 4 framework is single sourced so applications that use the dbExpress framework can be compiled for both win32 and the .net platform without any source code modification.

This is the sort of thing that makes application developers very happy.

And there’s more, I think. One of the things that caught my eye when looking at the Turbos was that the .NET version claimed that database applications developed using it would be portable between back-end databases without modification. (Well, except for things like connection strings.) So your clients can start off with something simple like, say, Access, and if their data requirements grow you can move easily to, say, SQL Server. The Win32 Turbo’s documentation does not claim this portability. But from what Steve has said it looks like Delphi 2007 (do I have to use the name Spacely?) will have that portability in all versions. I do hope so.

Of course that would be another nail in the coffin of the .NET compiler.

Various people have been commenting that Delphi is 12 years old today. Marco has the best post, combining it with a sneak preview of BDS 2007. The Vista stuff looks pretty. I guess I wouldn’t mind having a Vista system for development, as long as it was never connected to the Internet.

Also on Nick’s recent post is an announcement about some new hotfix patches for BDS2006. It would be nice when people make these announcements if they made clear whether they apply to the Turbos or not. I expect that they probably do as it does seem to be pretty much the same code, but it is always nice to be reassured that you won’t wreck your existing installation before adding an upgrade.

Update: Ah, good, it does apply to the Turbos. Thank you, Liz!

As per comments here, Nick Hodges has posted that the CodeRage conference will be free to attend. Not much to say to that except HOORAY!!!!