Borcon, E3, and a Blast from
the Past
(Borcon, E3, and a Blast from the Past: Page 1 of 1 )
By Andy Patrizio
June 17, 2002
Welcome back for another monthly dose of the
latest and greatest. How's this for a dose of the
sublime and the ridiculous: In the course of one
week I attended the 13th Borland Developer
Conference and the Electronic Entertainment
Expo (E3). I'll let you decide which is which.
Borcon, held at the Anaheim Convention Center
in Anaheim, California, was another upbeat
Borland-fest. The positive momentum and
enthusiasm for the company that was seen at last
year's show continued this year, and with good
reason. Borland's revenues and profits were up
in 2001, putting them in the distinct minority of
tech companies. Its Java IDE, JBuilder, is
number one in the Java compiler market, with
around 40 percent of the market. And Delphi, the
descendent of Turbo Pascal, continues to enjoy
strong sales.
The biggest news from the show was the
introduction of JBuilder 7, Borland Enterprise
Studio 4 for Java, and Optimizeit Suite 4.2.
JBuilder 7 connects with other products across
the development lifecycle, such as Borland
TeamSource for code management and the
Optimizeit Suite for performance testing.
Optimizeit now works within JBuilder to test the
code in real time, before an entire compile and
build process is done. This helps track down
performance bottlenecks during the coding
process, instead of chasing them down after the
application is compiled and running.
JBuilder 7 brings the Java IDE into full
compliance with the latest Java API and Web
services standards. The Visual EJB 2.0 designer
now includes support for BMP, multiple design
panes for a single EJB module, and the ability to
generate a schema from EJB. It can generate an
EJB module from imported EJB code and
supports dynamic hot deployment of EJBs to an
application server, such as BEA WebLogic
Server, IBM WebSphere, Oracle9i Application
Server, iPlanet Application Server and, of
course, Borland Enterprise Server.
One of the niftier new features in JBuilder 7 is its
on-the-fly error detection, which can be best
compared to the spell checker in Microsoft
Word. For example, if a programmer uses a
variable that hasn't been declared, a jagged red
line underlines the variable, just like a
misspelled word. Holding your mouse over the
offending variable brings up a tool tip saying that
the variable hasn't been declared.
The other product news was that C++Builder, the
C++ compiler with the Delphi-like interface,
would be released on Linux later this year.
Caldera was the sole third-party Linux vendor at
the show and a representative said he figured that
would be what kicked up interest in Borland in
the Linux community, since Linux is a C/C++
world, not a Pascal world.
As in previous Borcons, Dale Fuller went into
the audience and fielded questions directly from
developers. It's not too often you see a CEO go
into the audience and let his customers get in his
face like that, and watching the flacks try not to
have a panic attack was as entertaining as the
scripted skits. Most of the complaints were over
promotion and marketing. The Borland faithful
want to see more brought into the fold.
The next day brought a keynote by Anders
Hejlsberg, who created the Turbo Pascal
compiler and also headed up development of
Delphi. Hejlsberg defected to Microsoft in 1996,
and was there to talk up .NET. He gave a talk
similar to those he delivered earlier this year at
VSLive and SD Expo, pointing out that Web
services and XML use the exact same technology
and infrastructure as the Web and HTML, with
the only difference being that the former is
automated while the latter is operated by human
interaction.
In building .NET, Microsoft threw out all of the
existing technologies and started from scratch.
"Over time, we had accrued too many
technologies to manage. We realized we could
not get them there in an evolutionary fashion, by
just tweaking COM here and there. We had to
throw everything out and create a whole new
platform."
He described coding against WinAPI.h as "like
black magic to get anything working properly."
Libraries like Microsoft Foundation Classes,
Visual Basic and Delphi's OWL helped, but
locked you into a language. "Your choice of a
programming language became your choice of a
programming model, and skills don't transfer
between programming models," he said.
To get around language lock, Microsoft created
the Common Language Runtime. When coding to
the CLR, it doesn't matter what language you use;
you get all of .NET's features. The CLR
eliminates the need for a Registry since every
object is self-describing and will allow for
side-by-side execution of applications with
multiple versions of DLLs. There won't be a
problem with DLL conflicts because applications
are sandboxed.
Borland plans to support .NET through Delphi
and C++Builder. The next version of Delphi,
Delphi 7, will ship later this year and offer as
much support as there is on the market, for .NET
is coming out piece by piece and isn't fully
available yet. The following version of Delphi,
due in the first half of 2003, will have full .NET
support...
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