Although there are not much details unveiled yet, Nick Hodges made some statements about a new CodeGear product/project/plan called Delphi Prism at the SDN Conference in the Netherlands.
Marco Cantu was the first to blog about this statements, soon followed by Bob Swart, and Tim Anderson.
But no official statement yet! As it looks the official announcement will be made during the PDC Conference by the end of this month. (According to Allen Bauer's blogpost)
What we know now is that Delphi Prism will be a Visual Studio plugin, which I think is great news. As you might know I speculated somewhat over the Delphi .NET (That was the former name of the product) roadmap in previous blogposts, here(#2), here and here. Looks like my speculations were pretty accurate. :-P
I guess this will be the end of the speculation part although there are much questions unanswered, which I am sure will be answered in the near future.
4 comments:
I really don't like the direction where this is going. First of all, I don't get the big picture. Delphi users like to laugh about VB6 users (cause they were left in the cold by MS without a reasonable upgrade path) but if you look around, Borland/CodeGear did the same thing a lot of times: Kylix, Delphi/WinForms, Delphi/VCL (are they doing this now?), C# Builder, Mobile device development and quite some more. They change plans all the time.
What is the unique selling proposition of Delphi.Net? I can't think of any, if they give up on compatibility...
And being secret about the direction where they are going doesn't help anyone. I am more and more looking into alternatives (Scala looks really great)
There has been a lot of flip-flop under Borland but the reasons for the changes are different from Microsoft. M$ leverages their development tool position to force you into a never ending Windows upgrade path while Borland changes have been some bad guesses, management missteps and trying to make a buck in a shifting market with limited resources to apply to the problem.
The unique selling proposition? Somewhat limited, but there is some value add in the database extensions and it does provide a somewhat compatible path for migration to .Net while vastly reducing the .Net compatibility burden on Codegear.
Really, Codegear keeping secrets? Compared to Microsoft they are extremely candid and compared to Apple they are your Aunt Matilda that can't keep her mouth shut. The issue is that they had to do a license agreement with RemObjects and then seriously start on forming that into a product. You can't announce that ahead of time and then have it fall through because you would look stupid (and people would complain endlessly about that).
I am not here to overly defend Codegear but I do think they are a in tough market with limited resources and are generally trying to do a good job.
Thanks for your reply. The point for me is just, that I am not sure anymore if Delphi is what I need. But to be fair, my needs have changed and probably in a different direction as CodeGear's.
What I would like to have is a product that allows me to
- build great applications (check)
- that integrate into the platform nicely (check)
- build them quickly and elegantly (half queck)
- don't lock me into an OS platform (fail)
In their last roadmap they had those cross-platform-compiling ideas but they were just that: ideas. I understand that everyone has different wishes, so I just want them to tell us whether we should wait for a Solaris, Linux, MacOs, PocketPC whatever compiler or if I should look somewhere else.
But back to the .Net plans:
The problem with Delphi and .Net is that Delphi simply wasn't made for .Net. Oxygene of course is a pretty product, but from I have heard it sounded more like Delphi.Net was ported to VS than CodeGear licensing Oxygene. Did I miss something here?
Daniel, I totally understand your position on a tool meeting your needs. That is the bottom line for any developer. For what it is worth, I wish Delphi could create multi platform apps too (but it is not a deal breaker for me right now).
The RemObjects Oxygene remark is based on 1) a RemObjects blog post mentioned they just signed an exciting Oxygene deal that they can't talk about and 2) just a short time later Codegear announcing a VS Pascal language addin. All just speculation, but a highly likely tie-in IMHO.
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