Can you explain what you mean by the BCB/CBuilderX situation?
As far as I see it, all Borland tools except JBuilder are dead meat now. Nobody uses Kylix partially because it doesn't compile to the Linux platform but only the Linux-x86 platform and partially because there's no 3rd party support for it. Also, deployment of apps is not support well.
Delphi 8 discontinues the Win32 platform, leaving many things like Unicode on Win32 unsolved. And if you're going .net, there's not much difference between Delphi and Microsoft Visual Studio with C#. There are differences, but in the .net marketplace, C# and Microsoft are huge. I've bought Delphi 8, but will very likely make more and more apps with C# instead as time goes by. I'm not sure I'll buy the following Delphi version - which is the first time in Borland history since Turbo Pascal 5.0. The end of Win32 is the end of Delphi.
Borland killed off Interbase themselves by not going full Open Source on all versions. MySQL is capable of handling more and more solutions where Interbase would have been obvious before, and PostgreSQL, Microsoft Data Engine etc. are also taking away market share. You can buy extremely cheap webhotels with PostgreSQL support (http://www.surftown.dk/, $1.50 a month), but I've never seen Interbase on a webhotel.
There are 3 platforms for the PC that survive: Linux, Java, .net. I don't think Borland will do well for some time on other platforms than Java.
Dybdahl. |
