Borland has a long history of producing quality application development
products. However like most technical savvy companies, Borland has suffered the fate of
not marketing to the right people. The power and ease-of-use of Delphi has not been properly communicated to IT management.
Borland's products were for some strange reason targeted at individual developers instead
of corporate developers.
Sure, I was hesitant about going with Delphi. I had reason to be. In the late 1980's, I was involved in a project to select a new development
environment. We chose Ingres' RDBMS and 4GL. It was a superior environment and language to the likes of Oracle. Technologically, Ingres' 4GL produced C code which was compiled into
a true EXE. Yep, way before the likes of Delphi or PowerBuilder.
Oracle was truly selling vaporware. Everything but the kitchen sink would be in the next release, However, Ingres didn't understand the
marketing game as well as Oracle. Today, Oracle's market share of the DBMS is huge. I still shake my head in bewilderment. How can companies spend so much money for a product ?
Not to mention that it requires a slew of dedicated DBA's.
Lesson learned, one must look at the choices objectively from a business point of view not just the technical merits. Forget the
impressive mile long feature list.
Anyone in a management position must answer the following fundamental questions at a bare minimum with confidence :
- Do you know what you want? That's the first question. Remember stop thinking like a wannabe.
- Will the vendor will remain an ongoing concern?
- Are there developers outside of my company that I can hire ? Note that there must be a market in your city.
- What is the future of the product?
- Are there third party vendors? This is key because if no one produces components or tools then I'd say NO. Unless you are willing to go it alone. Bad proposition.
The future is with component based development. The result will be frameworks.
Use a RFP process, not RFI. Think of choosing a product like you would when you are looking for a car or house. Really it's no different.
Prepare questions for companies using the product and talk to IT developers and managers about their experiences, good and bad. Do the same with newsgroups. Spend some money on
reports from INDEPENDENT parties. Would you buy a house without having a independent inspection ? That's right DUE DILIGENCE.
With all that said and done. Delphi is finally after 3 years making inroads. Major companies are licensing it's technology, i.e. Oracle.
Borland has worked with IBM to develop a version for AS/400. Delphi/400 was released in mid 1997. In turn, the influential technology media and pundents are jumping onboard with
their favourable reviews. Corporate IT management and developers are following because companies are able to produce applications on time and on budget. The proof is there.
The argument that VB is Object-Oriented is TOTALLY ludicrous. Delphi has classes, inheritance, polymorphism, and encapsulation, whereas, VB
does not. Sure you can't dismiss over 1 million VB programmers. But let me pose this question, look back to the early 1990's when Dbase was all the rage and I ask, why did
organinzations chose VB ?
Delphi is compiled into a real EXE. VB on the other hand produces a quasi EXE because you must have the supporting 1.5 MB DLL for it to run.
People at Microsoft has spent millions telling everyone otherwise BUT the people who actually do the work know better.
Putting aside all of the technical criteria, let's look at the business side. Borland hasn't been the blockbuster company. In the past year a
new management team has restored it to profitability. Their support still has some improvements to make but whose doesn't. Have you checked out VB newsgroups. They are
filled with product bugs whereas Borland's contains actual help.
I'll admit that Delphi is not perfect but what
is. I thank Ajay for helping see the light. If
it's good enough for NASA then they've done most of my work.
Borland, will "REMAIN AN ONGOING CONCERN". Delphi will remain a great product. Delphi remains
the most best product I've seen and used. It has ease of use with the breath and depth of
technologies. Here are but a few.
- COM, DCOM, CORBA
- Sybase, Microsoft, Oracle, DB2, MySQL, Interbase and scores more
- MAPI, ISAPI IISAPI
- WIN API, NT Services, Linux!!!
- Internet goodies, HTML, TCP/IP ... etc etc etc
Some would argue that it's not cross platform. Sure it isn't but how many people let alone companies do you know that do cross platform
development. If this is what you're requirements are then pick C and happy coding.
Enough of the verbal diatribe, the proof is in the pudding. Go out and try it. That's right take it for a test drive. And if you don't like
it then at least you have the satisfaction of KNOWING from first hand experience instead of believing what you heard or read.
But if you do like it then you too will have found the light.
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