Re: Borland kills another developer tool

From: Lauchlan M (LMackinnon_at_NOSPAMHotmail.com)
Date: 04/13/04 

Date: Tue, 13 Apr 2004 11:03:49 +1000

> This was an announcement that came out of the blue with no warning.
>
> Seeing how Borland "supports" developers has made me finally decide to
wipe
> Delphi 7. All my future development will be in VS .NET.

I was thinking about this the other day . . . there is a bigger problem in
my opinion, and that is that Borland have stopped innovating.

Sure, the Delphi team are buulding great new things all the time but I can't
see how they are really innovating. If you have a look back through the
recent history of Delphi releases, it is all about keeping up with the
Joneses - of implementing features to catch up with what others want to do
in the market. For example, the big thing in Delphi 8 was .NET (MS's big
bandwagon of the moment), there wasn't really a big thing (or anything new!
<g>) in Delphi 7 (apart from bundling third party stuff with the product),
the big thing in Delphi 6 was web services. But apart from keeping up with
someone else's 'next big thing', Borland didn't innovate. For example, there
was a huge opportunity for them to innovate a RAD web develpment environment
for Delphi, but this was left to third party players - Developer Express and
AtoZed.

I guess you could say that Borland are innovating to some extent in the life
cycle / MDA sphere, but again this 'innovation' is primarily driven by
acquisition, not development.

OK, all this "following Joneses" is inarguably a necessary and good idea.
But there are two problems:

(i) With this focus on following the Joneses and just keeping up with the
next big thing, Borland are followers and not innovators, and there is
progressively less and less to differentiate Delphi from its competition

(ii) With the focus on keeping up with the next biggest thing as defined by
someone else or market trends, Borland not only bypass opportunities to
innovate and forge an identity and enhanced reputation for themselves, but
they don't seem to get around to consolidating the basics in Delphi. For
example in Delphi 7, around 10 years after the first release of Delphi

- you can't right-click to cut and paste inthe Object Inspector
- if you copy a component on a form and paste it elsewhere on that form or
another form, it always puts it where the original component was, not where
you want to paste it to
- the library path is still limited to some arbitrary and small number of
characters, leading to "library path hell" every time one installs a new set
of third party components (after installing a certain number of them)
- the packages framework has been crying out for an overhaul for ages. For
example, I use NexusDB, and I have some RemObjects and kbmmw packages which
depend on the NexusDB ones. Every time NexusDB release a new version, the
package system forces them to use different names for the packages -

<<
The reason is purely technical. If the public interface of a package
changes, then we *must* change package names. If we dont, then we introduce
package hell for those of our customers who deploy packages, since there
would exist several different version of the same name.

It doesnt help how 'nice' it would be to avoid it, it simply is not possible
without introducing major problems for package users.

As stated before: get Borland to make Delphi smarter about package
relations.
>>

which means whenever they release a new version (which is often! <g>) I need
to recompile the runtimes for kbmmw, RO etc, uninstall the design time and
reinstall the design time packages. Either NexusDB inflict one kind of
package hell on customers by changing the names, or they inflict another
kind of package hell on people by not changing them. Not a great choice!

A hassle, to say the least.

My point is not to list hassles with Delphi 7. My point is that these are
all extremely basic things that should have by any reasonable estimation
have been sorted out at least 3 or four versions ago. But these usability
features don't get done because of Borland's continual focus on the next
big-ticket-item of the day, instead of what necessarily improves our
day-to-day coding experience and productivity, or what forges a new niche of
productivity and differentiation in Borland products.

OK, I said my bit . . . <g>

Lauchlan Mackinnon.

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