CodeGear Announces RAD Studio 2007
Important news for supporters of CodeGear products (a company owned by Borland, to which development tools have been transferred): the release of RAD Studio 2007 (codename “Highlander”) is announced - an all-in-one development package combining Delphi for Win 32, Delphi for .NET and C ++ Builder.
Please note that the official announcement does not say anything about C # Builder, which was included in the previous version - Borland Developer Studio 2006. In one of the presentations on the new version, I found “IDE no longer offers design-time support for C #” - these are the times it looks like C # Builder will have to say goodbye, and those of the few developers who managed to get hooked on this product are forced to willy-nilly move to VS.
Among the innovations, nothing particularly revolutionary was found, the most important ones being support for .NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 2.0, a new version of the MDD framework ECO IV, dbExpress 4 (which debuted earlier in the year in Delphi 2007), replacing the built-in assembly engine with MSBuild (which also appeared earlier in Delphi 2007) some Delphi language extensions, mostly borrowed from C #, as well as the lightweight Blackfish SQL DBMS (now called Steve Shaughnessy developed by unique JDataStore / NDataStore DBMS, which is written in Java, but its source code translated in C # and also works under .NET ).
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Despite possible assumptions, the new version did not become a truly integrated solution that combines all CodeGear IDEs, for example, Delphi for PHP remains an independent product, as well as the Ruby IDE , which is expected to be released in the third quarter of this year.
It’s good that RAD Studio has added support for .NET 2.0, it’s sad that in Visual Studio it has been for two years now - it’s time to count on support for .NET 3.5.
As a result, despite all the attempts of Borland / CodeGear to catch up with Microsoft, the picture is just the opposite: the gap widens with each release of the products of competing companies, and the new version surprised everyone with battle losses (I mean buried C # Builder alive). I do not know the exact statistics, but it seems to me that there are not so many supporters of Delphi for .NET, and the main income comes from "classical" developers using Delphi for Win32.
It is unlikely that CodeGear has achieved particular success in promoting RAD Studio as a tool for creating enterprise applications, where Java / .NET positions (if we are talking about .NET, we mean, of course, VS) are particularly strong and are becoming stronger. Although, for example, such a thing as ECO for CodeGear is really quite interesting. Maybe it makes sense to come up with some kind of original market strategy, and stop fighting with monsters? For example, isolate the ECO and sell it as a supplement to Visual Studio? Or focus on VCL for the Web (formerly IntraWeb) and offer a lightweight tool for developing Web applications based on this approach? Or revive Kylix? Well, at least it would not hurt to lower prices - they look like space ones (for example, the Professional version costs $ 1.2K plus an annual support fee of $ 350), especially since the new versions are released quite often (I repeatedly observed the picture when the organization switched from pirated on legal Delphi and further on a specific version and remained, without being updated for many years - why pay more, if there are still no fundamental improvements in new versions).
By the way, I remember that representatives of Borland in the midst of isolating a separate company said that it was Highlander that would be a real breakthrough in functionality and quality. But if it’s too early to judge about quality - after all, the product hasn’t yet been released, but only announced, then there are questions on functionality. For example, why in the announcement there is no mention of Unicode support in the VCL for Win32, why is nothing said about the “native” Delphi 64-bit compiler? And apart from this, nothing is said about the many other promised functions for which promises were heard: “Have some patience, it will all be in Highlander.”
Personally, I do not understand the limitations inherent in the released versions, for example, the Professional version allows you to create Blackfish SQL databases no larger than 512 MB available to 1 (!) User, as well as supporting 1 processor, and applications using VCL for the Web (note): maximum with 5th (!) connections. This is someone who needs such a DBMS, so that only one person can login to it, and why is such a site needed, which a maximum of five users can use? :)
The pinnacle of insanity - in the Enterprise Blackfish SQL version, it is still limited to 1 processor, but 2 GB of the base file size and a maximum of 5 (!) Users. What kind of "enterprise" is this, in which only 5 people can connect to the database?
Although it is easy to explain the restrictions, it is modestly stated everywhere that restrictions are removed for an additional fee. But in my opinion, this is an obvious search, for example, MS SQL Server 2005 Express Edition available for free (completely free, you don’t need to buy any studios to use it) is limited to a database size of 4 GB, which is exactly twice as large as “ black fish "in the Enterprise version of RAD Studio 2007 and eight times more than it is in the Professional version. In addition, SQL Server Express has only one additional limitation compared to Blackfish - no more than 1 GB of used memory, and there are no restrictions on remote connections ( contrary to popular belief that SQL Server Express is a local DBMS).
It is sad that the demand for Delphi-programmers is falling, and if we have a decent Delphi-developer you can still find decent work, then in the West it is quite difficult.
Although not everything is so tragic - for example, on delphiplus.org there is information (written in the news of September 2) that in Russia all school computers will be equipped with licensed software by the end of the year, where Delphi appears in the Development Tools category. Maybe Russia will help revive the popularity of Delphi, and maybe it is the implementation of the secret plan of the Russian government to reduce brain drain abroad. :)
An interesting observation: the version coming out in the autumn gets the index of 2007, while Borland has released the release of its flagship product for the last few years also in the fall, but with the version number corresponding to the next year. This moment looks especially intriguing in light of the imminent release of RAD Studio’s main competitor, Microsoft Visual Studio, which will have a version number of 2008, while the version number of Borland products has traditionally been one higher than Microsoft’s. Is the release of RAD Studio 2008 expected in a very short time, especially since CodeGear has a lot to do in order to catch up with Microsoft?
Although the changed policy in version numbering has another explanation: as a rule, the tools for Borland / CodeGear developers are updated more often than Microsoft products, and if it is unwise to use version numbers, then they may simply not be enough. :)
From the author: I re-read the text of my post anew, I see that it turns out from the category “started for health - finished for the peace”. But here, it seems there is nowhere to go - I started to collect information about the new release with optimism, read official materials, looked at presentations, records in blocks, presentations - but the more information I collected, the more disappointed it was. Highlander is the most awaited version of RAD Studio, since it was not developed by Borland, but by CodeGear, it was from this release that supporters of Borland products expected a miracle. But it seems that the miracle did not happen, although it was very desirable. In any case, healthy criticism is only for the benefit, perhaps this post will be read by CodeGear employees and leave their opinion on this subject - I remember Sergey Orlik on my blog comments, but I don’t know - he is now in Borland or CodeGear.
Vyacheslav Koldovsky, Developers.Org.Ua
Note: Climbed on Google Trends and I was surprised by the results. A couple of weeks ago, Ukraine & Kiev were on the first lines, and now Russia & Moscow. Kiev generally disappeared from Top10. Google hike something somewhere screwed up.
Please note that the official announcement does not say anything about C # Builder, which was included in the previous version - Borland Developer Studio 2006. In one of the presentations on the new version, I found “IDE no longer offers design-time support for C #” - these are the times it looks like C # Builder will have to say goodbye, and those of the few developers who managed to get hooked on this product are forced to willy-nilly move to VS.
Among the innovations, nothing particularly revolutionary was found, the most important ones being support for .NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 2.0, a new version of the MDD framework ECO IV, dbExpress 4 (which debuted earlier in the year in Delphi 2007), replacing the built-in assembly engine with MSBuild (which also appeared earlier in Delphi 2007) some Delphi language extensions, mostly borrowed from C #, as well as the lightweight Blackfish SQL DBMS (now called Steve Shaughnessy developed by unique JDataStore / NDataStore DBMS, which is written in Java, but its source code translated in C # and also works under .NET ).
')
Despite possible assumptions, the new version did not become a truly integrated solution that combines all CodeGear IDEs, for example, Delphi for PHP remains an independent product, as well as the Ruby IDE , which is expected to be released in the third quarter of this year.
It’s good that RAD Studio has added support for .NET 2.0, it’s sad that in Visual Studio it has been for two years now - it’s time to count on support for .NET 3.5.
As a result, despite all the attempts of Borland / CodeGear to catch up with Microsoft, the picture is just the opposite: the gap widens with each release of the products of competing companies, and the new version surprised everyone with battle losses (I mean buried C # Builder alive). I do not know the exact statistics, but it seems to me that there are not so many supporters of Delphi for .NET, and the main income comes from "classical" developers using Delphi for Win32.
It is unlikely that CodeGear has achieved particular success in promoting RAD Studio as a tool for creating enterprise applications, where Java / .NET positions (if we are talking about .NET, we mean, of course, VS) are particularly strong and are becoming stronger. Although, for example, such a thing as ECO for CodeGear is really quite interesting. Maybe it makes sense to come up with some kind of original market strategy, and stop fighting with monsters? For example, isolate the ECO and sell it as a supplement to Visual Studio? Or focus on VCL for the Web (formerly IntraWeb) and offer a lightweight tool for developing Web applications based on this approach? Or revive Kylix? Well, at least it would not hurt to lower prices - they look like space ones (for example, the Professional version costs $ 1.2K plus an annual support fee of $ 350), especially since the new versions are released quite often (I repeatedly observed the picture when the organization switched from pirated on legal Delphi and further on a specific version and remained, without being updated for many years - why pay more, if there are still no fundamental improvements in new versions).
By the way, I remember that representatives of Borland in the midst of isolating a separate company said that it was Highlander that would be a real breakthrough in functionality and quality. But if it’s too early to judge about quality - after all, the product hasn’t yet been released, but only announced, then there are questions on functionality. For example, why in the announcement there is no mention of Unicode support in the VCL for Win32, why is nothing said about the “native” Delphi 64-bit compiler? And apart from this, nothing is said about the many other promised functions for which promises were heard: “Have some patience, it will all be in Highlander.”
Personally, I do not understand the limitations inherent in the released versions, for example, the Professional version allows you to create Blackfish SQL databases no larger than 512 MB available to 1 (!) User, as well as supporting 1 processor, and applications using VCL for the Web (note): maximum with 5th (!) connections. This is someone who needs such a DBMS, so that only one person can login to it, and why is such a site needed, which a maximum of five users can use? :)
The pinnacle of insanity - in the Enterprise Blackfish SQL version, it is still limited to 1 processor, but 2 GB of the base file size and a maximum of 5 (!) Users. What kind of "enterprise" is this, in which only 5 people can connect to the database?
Although it is easy to explain the restrictions, it is modestly stated everywhere that restrictions are removed for an additional fee. But in my opinion, this is an obvious search, for example, MS SQL Server 2005 Express Edition available for free (completely free, you don’t need to buy any studios to use it) is limited to a database size of 4 GB, which is exactly twice as large as “ black fish "in the Enterprise version of RAD Studio 2007 and eight times more than it is in the Professional version. In addition, SQL Server Express has only one additional limitation compared to Blackfish - no more than 1 GB of used memory, and there are no restrictions on remote connections ( contrary to popular belief that SQL Server Express is a local DBMS).
It is sad that the demand for Delphi-programmers is falling, and if we have a decent Delphi-developer you can still find decent work, then in the West it is quite difficult.
Although not everything is so tragic - for example, on delphiplus.org there is information (written in the news of September 2) that in Russia all school computers will be equipped with licensed software by the end of the year, where Delphi appears in the Development Tools category. Maybe Russia will help revive the popularity of Delphi, and maybe it is the implementation of the secret plan of the Russian government to reduce brain drain abroad. :)
An interesting observation: the version coming out in the autumn gets the index of 2007, while Borland has released the release of its flagship product for the last few years also in the fall, but with the version number corresponding to the next year. This moment looks especially intriguing in light of the imminent release of RAD Studio’s main competitor, Microsoft Visual Studio, which will have a version number of 2008, while the version number of Borland products has traditionally been one higher than Microsoft’s. Is the release of RAD Studio 2008 expected in a very short time, especially since CodeGear has a lot to do in order to catch up with Microsoft?
Although the changed policy in version numbering has another explanation: as a rule, the tools for Borland / CodeGear developers are updated more often than Microsoft products, and if it is unwise to use version numbers, then they may simply not be enough. :)
From the author: I re-read the text of my post anew, I see that it turns out from the category “started for health - finished for the peace”. But here, it seems there is nowhere to go - I started to collect information about the new release with optimism, read official materials, looked at presentations, records in blocks, presentations - but the more information I collected, the more disappointed it was. Highlander is the most awaited version of RAD Studio, since it was not developed by Borland, but by CodeGear, it was from this release that supporters of Borland products expected a miracle. But it seems that the miracle did not happen, although it was very desirable. In any case, healthy criticism is only for the benefit, perhaps this post will be read by CodeGear employees and leave their opinion on this subject - I remember Sergey Orlik on my blog comments, but I don’t know - he is now in Borland or CodeGear.
Vyacheslav Koldovsky, Developers.Org.Ua
Note: Climbed on Google Trends and I was surprised by the results. A couple of weeks ago, Ukraine & Kiev were on the first lines, and now Russia & Moscow. Kiev generally disappeared from Top10. Google hike something somewhere screwed up.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/13935/
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