Kylix is dead now

Borland has updated its Classic Products page to include Borland Kylix. Borland states on this page, that all listed products are still available for purchase, however, Borland does not offer further enhancements or support for those products.

Therefore Borland Kylix is effectivly dead now! Kylix has been Borlands product to offer cross plattform development using Borland C++Builder and Borland Delphi and taking applications to Linux using the CLX library.

Creating a Community Questionnaire

Currently I am asking our German Delphi Community to submit questions about the future of Borland Delphi and Borland InterBase. During the next few days we will collect such questions and then start a poll which of those questions submitted will be send off to DavidI and Scott Arnold for answers.

This questionnaire will not be about technical questions, but about the future of our beloved products themselves. If you feel that you have a question yourself, feel free to post it here as comment or directly at the location mentioned above. We can add that to the list of choices as well.

But remember, the community will decide which questions are going to be send to Borland. So there is no guarantee yours will go off. But hey, that's your chance ;-) It doesn't hurt to think about your future as well.

Email exchange with the CEO

As I wrote last week, I've send off an e-mail to Scott Arnold, after taking the latest Borland Community Survey. Today I am going to post both e-mails here for you to read what is going on. For what its worth, it probably is pretty much what we all know, but it is yet to be continued, I hope.

First of, my original email to Scott.

From: Daniel Wischnewski [mailto:daniel@wischnewski.tv]
Sent: Tuesday, August 16, 2005 6:00 AM
To: Scott Arnold
Subject: I'd like a word about Borland Delphi - on behalf of Germanys
largest Delphi community

Hello Scott,

First off, as you are CEO of a Wall Street company, I am aware that your time is very limited. But maybe you have some time to read this and even answer.

I understand Borlands move toward ALM. Yet, as long time Pascal and Delphi developer, starting back in 1992, when I were just 15 years old, I am afraid of Delphis future.

Somehow it looks like Borland is more and more ignoring the value of Delphi in favor of other ALM tools. Just a few months ago Delphi or the Borland Developer Studio (BDS) was mentioned as part of the ALM scheme. Nowadays ALM concentrates more and more on StarTeam, CaliberRM and Together. Besides the BDS, InterBase seems to got lost on the way, too. While having one of the best database systems, Borland seems to simply ignore it.

As long-time lover of Borland tools, as co-administrator of the largest German Delphi/C#Builder and soon C++Builder community I am scared to my bones what will happen next.

Is there anything you can say either in private or in public about Borlands standpoint on Delphi? I am part of the DeXter field test, I am part of the freelancing developers of DeXter, and I am looking forward to this great release. Yet I am scared...!

Sincerely,
Co-Administrator Delphi-PRAXiS
www.delphipraxis.net

Now his reply:

From: Scott Arnold
Sent: Tuesday, August 16, 2005 11:44 AM
To: Daniel Wischnewski
Cc: David Intersimone
Subject: RE: I'd like a word about Borland Delphi - on behalf of
Germanys largest Delphi community

Dan,

Delphi is very much alive, appreciated, and pushing forward at Borland.

In my opinion, the Delphi team is pioneering much of what we are doing in ALM in the java space by incorporating functionality from other Borland products like StarTeam and Together into Delphi to make dev teams more productive. Delphi is also critical to our .NET links to MSFT along with Together for VS and our Caliber version working with VSTS.

As you know from the Dexter field test, Borland is delivering on our promise made last December to the C++ community to create a future for the BCB product inside Delphi as a personality. I have high hopes for the take-up of the C++ personality (and all of the new value available in this release) by that vocal community once we deliver on Dexter.

I shared my views on Borland's opportunity with the Delphi team recently in an all hands in Scotts Valley and would be happy to deliver this message to whomever will listen. I met with Michael Swindell and Steve Todd on Friday to review Dexter's progress and am in touch with Danny Thorpe, Allen Bauer and other members of the team as I am able. I also made time to join in on the 24 hours of Delphi with David I and the DevRel team.

As for IB, Borland remains committed to supporting our customers and will continue to use our database technology in our own products as it makes sense. If you have specific ideas on how to leverage IB better, I'd love to hear them.

Scott

A special Thank You to DavidI for allowing me to go forward and post those e-mails as seen here.

Dr. Bob has his new ECO Blog online

Two days ago, Dr. Bob has started his new Blog developed in ECO II and put it online. While still in development, he writes articles about ECO and how to he created his Blog with it and publishes them for free.

8 hours of InterBase

At the Indian conference, John Kaster said during his ECO II presentation, that Borland is planing the next BDN TV (or BDN Radio) episode and that this will be an eight hours session on Borlands premier database and deployment system InterBase.

With all that mysterious noise surrounding InterBase lately, this may be the light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe there is hope for InterBase, this news together with the fact that Bill Todds DevCon session 2124 is on InterBase 7.5 and 8.0 is giving my hope a chance for a future in InterBase.

New Design

Well, it has taken a few weeks, but finally I abandoned the normal eBlogger template and came up with my own design. I hope you like it. There may be a few quirks left yet, but I hope it displays well in most cases.

If you feel that there is a problem with the display, let me know. I'll try to fix it - no promises though.

Taking a Borland Web Survey

Two days ago I got an e-mail Borland Developer Network News - August 2005 and DavidI asked all receipients to take a web survey. I didn't wait for long and started the survey. The first questions are the usual things you'd expect from Borland, in fact question 13 and 14 are that as well, but the provided choices for your answers are shoking!

Question 13: At your location, what is the database system your deployed applications access most often ? Well, for most Delphi developers the answer would be InterBase, but hey, that answer is not one of the given choices...

Question 14: Who is or was the vendor of your organization's primary deployment environment/platform ? Well, accordingly, most of us would expect to select Borland as the vendor. But again, that is not in the range of the choices given...

So, after having completed that survey I started my e-mail client and started writing an e-mail to the Interim-CEO Scott Arnold, asking what's up. I would not have expected to get an answer, in fact, I would not have expected him to read it, but as things turned out, he did read it and he answered. COOL!

Stay tuned as I will post the e-mail exchange between him, DavidI and myself within the next days.