People are complaining that it’s just not the same now that Philippe Kahn has been relegated to the role of chairman and is not there with his powerful presence in the thick of every announcement, but Borland International Inc is going back to its roots with the release of Delphi and Delphi Client/Server. The Scotts Valley, California company will concentrate on development tools from now on, as it aims for stability and profitability. Delphi is a combination of what the company claims to be the fastest optimising native-code compiler, based on Object Pascal, an object-oriented component-based architecture, a visual development environment for rapid application development, or RAD, and scalable database technology. Delphi will join Paradox, dBase and C++ at the centre of the slimmed-down Borland’s strategy, but Zack Urlocker, group product manager, stressed that there was no silver bullet, and they all must play their part. The addition of Delphi will no doubt make the company even more attr active to potential predators. Borland has more than 3,000 beta sites around the world for the product, and many applications have already been produced using it. Delphi was entirely written in itself, proving, says Borland, the strength of the application and the versatility of its component-based architecture. Delphi has a compiler continuously running in the background that picks up any changes made by the developer and keeps the code synchronised. It works through a combination of pattern matching and parsing. Borland emphasised the applications’ suitability for rapid application development – RADical performance was the Californian colloquialism used – but maintained that it is also suitable for mission-critical applications. Most of the applications written using the beta version however, have been produced by companies that previously would have written them using Paradox, C++, Power Builder or Visual Basic. Portsmouth, Hampshire-based Dunstan Thomas Ltd is one such company. Managing director Chris Read described himself as tickled pink by Delphi and the company has started developing applications using a beta release. Read emphasised the scalability of the product, citing its database engine as particularly useful for application development. The client-server version of Delphi has drivers and unlimited licences for Oracle, Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, Informix and InterBase, as well as a local InterBase server. It also has an Object Database Connectivity link. Code written in other applcations can also be imported into Delphi and manipulated in the same visual form. Borland is focussing on a worldwide development community of only 6m for Delphi. In the past it could aim its products at around 150m end users.
Cheaper and more rewarding
This shift in emphasis will further help the company reduce its costs. International group product manager Matt Price pointed out that marketing to developers is cheaper and more rewarding than to end users, as apart from the size of the market, more can be achieved electronically. Developers are also more grateful than end users when problems are pointed out, end users get freaked out, developers say thank you, said Price. He tentatively projected the first quarter of next fiscal, which starts on April 1, as being profitable. Borland has learned to be more conservative with its estimates than in the past when it had its fing ers in too many pies, according to Price. Delphi, which will be dup licated and packaged up in Ireland and the US, comes in two versions and will ship in a few days. It will cost ú350 with a 90-day intro ductory offer price of ú200. The client-server version, which adds the SQL drivers, the Visual Query Builder, ReportSmith SQL and the source code for the visual compon ent library, is priced at ú1,000.
