By Jason Stamper
Inprise Corp is working on a Linux version of its Delphi development suite for Windows, Computerwire has learned. While the company publicly announced the immediate availability of a Linux version of its Visibroker object request broker (ORB) on August 10, and also demonstrated a Linux version of its JBuilder Java integrated development environment (IDE), there was no news of a Delphi for Linux at that time.
Creating a Linux version of Delphi is not an easy task however, as Delphi was written from the ground up for Windows. Visibroker was a straight-forward port to Linux, but we will have a lot more work to do on getting Delphi to support Linux, an Inprise executive close to the project told us. The new version should be available, some time next year, possibly first quarter, he said.
According to Inprise, the availability of development tools for Linux with which developers are already familiar will accelerate the adoption of Linux as a server platform, and create a new market for Linux as a client platform. People aren’t using Linux on the client today because the applications aren’t there – and the applications aren’t there because the development tools haven’t been there to build them, the executive said. The availability of the Linux version of Visibroker already means that developers can integrate applications or component parts of an application written in different languages (Java or C++) and for different platforms. Visibroker was already available on Windows NT, Sun Solaris, IBM AIX, HP-UX, SGI Irix, Digital Unix, IBM OS/390, Novell NetWare and vxWorks. Developers can now use Visibroker to integrate Linux into their existing environment.
Asked whether adding support for Linux to its tools portfolio meant having to sacrifice support for another operating system, Inprise said that Silicon Graphics’ Irix Unix will be the likely casualty, but that since SGI is moving to Windows NT and Linux itself, Irix would have been fading anyhow.
Meanwhile, Inprise also this month announced the availability of Delphi 5.0, having added support for HTML 4 and Extensible Markup Language (XML). The Linux version of JBuilder, JBuilder 3.0, will also have support for Sun Solaris, and will ship in the first quarter 2000. Also on the product release front, the company is beta testing a new version of its Application Server with added support for Enterprise Java Beans 1.1 that should see general availability before year-end. Visibroker 4.0 will see light of day in the fourth quarter of this year too – that gets support for Corba 2.3 and Remote Method Invocation (RMI).
Inprise is treading water slightly financially – its second- quarter results announced on July 26 were poor. Net revenue was $40.2m, excluding a one-time license fee from Microsoft of $100m, compared to $46.5m a year ago. Dale Fuller, interim CEO and president is on a cost-cutting exercise after the resignations of CEO Del Yocam and the CFO Kathleen Fisher in March this year. For the second-quarter he brought about a $3m reduction in operating expense quarter on quarter excluding restructuring expenses in the first quarter.
