ADUG Meeting June 1997

These notes by Glenn Lawrence © 1997

Q&A Session

As usual the Q&A session generated a lot of discussion and information.Here are just a few items that I managed to note down.

Dave Mehlman asked about problems he was experiencing using Delphi in an OS/2 environment. Solutions were not obvious, but those members with an interest in Delphi and OS/2 (Andrea?) offered to help out if needed.

Steve Moller noted that the Delphi 1 debugger seemed to lose some drill down capability when running under NT. Paul Spain suggested that the debugger doesn't work so well with identifiers that are in object scope, although it wasn't clear if this was due to running under NT/95. The solution is to qualify the identifiers with the name of the object to which they belong. Prefixing with "self." may even be sufficient.

Tony Rietwyk asked about handling graphics objects in a non GUI environment, in particular when writing an NT services application or DLL. Peter Szymiczek suggested that it could be a permissions problem. Other suggestions were that maybe some of the components he was using need access to a window handle to work correctly.

Mark Weston asked about information on how to subscribe to the Delphi/SQL server mailing list. Peter Szymiczek offered to post the necessary info to *our* mailing list.

Jason King asked how to find out if a screensaver was running and how to close it if it was. The problem being made more difficult by having to handle screen saver apps that weren't properly named or registered. Various suggestions were made, but the most promising seemed to be David Kemp's idea of faking a mouse move or key press.

Presentation - "The view from the top"

Ray Bradbery has been CEO of Borland Australia since 1994 and in that time has seen the company through some difficult times to a much healthier present outlook.

To open his talk, Ray outlined the recent positive changes at Borland Australia with the creation of a local R&D group of around 15 people within the company. No longer will the local subsidiary be simply a marketing and distribution arm of the US parent, but will have an active role in product development.

The company is also extending its local activities in training and mentoring.

Ray mentioned that Borland is putting a lot more emphasis on its overseas operations and that this will mean that we in Australia will have more influence than before on the direction Borland takes.

Ray then outlined the thinking behind the creation of Borland's new "Enterprise Division".

He said that Borland realised that they couldn't compete with Microsoft at the cheap-and-cheerful end of the developer market as Microsoft had many more marketing dollars than Borland.

The strategy therefore is to move into the corporate market to take advantage of various new opportunities that are emerging there.

Briefly these are:

Corporates are increasingly keen to exploit the opportunities presented by the Internet and are looking for ways to leverage their existing systems and databases to provide them with a meaningful Net presence.
The Internet makes it so that anyone can deal with anyone, so this is forcing business to change and they need to change their existing systems in response.
The Internet spans geo-political boundaries and governments will want to try to control the electronic commerce to collect taxes and provide regulation.
IT shops tend to be slow, but the Internet is forcing change very quickly. It is hard for developers to keep up with a changing software development environment. Many "standards" such as Corba and Java are still in flux and it will be some time before they are settled.
Corporates' "legacy" systems are actually what run their businesses and they can't afford for them to be unavailable due to overload or other failures, nor can they be completely re-written in one hit. New technology is needed to support these systems and also to facilitate their incremental upgrade.
The so-called "millennium bug" is real and corporates already recognise this. For example Mobil Singapore has allocated $A30 million on just that problem alone, without yielding any additional business benefit! Many real time process control systems (along with the installations they run) will be deliberately shut down on the night of Dec 31 1999 to minimise possible damage caused by changing dates.
Software systems are becoming increasingly complex as they have to interact with numerous other systems over more connections with more data that has to be processed in increasingly innovative ways.
The development life cycle for systems has typically collapsed to around 6 months and many are intended to be simply thrown away when they get out of step with changing business needs.
IT departments are shrinking and more development work is being outsourced.
The dream of a "paperless office" is still there, and is even being realised by some corporates - for example MMI in Sydney. More and more business processing is performed by computer systems to the point where businesses "don't know how to do it manually anymore".

Borland plans to meet these opportunities with a number of solutions.

Multi-tier architecture rather than just two-tier client server. This approach has a number of advantages, not least of which is the ability to spread the workload. For example, if you conduct business over the Internet you can't control how many people want to use your system at one time. By allowing work to be spread over several servers the multi-tier architecture allows much easier scalability. "Intelligent middleware" also gives improved reliability through database mirroring and failover mechanisms. Borland's multi-tier and middleware product is called MIDAS and was released with Delphi 3.
Component libraries: Borland will continue its support of component-based development by enhancing the Visual Control Library, as well as providing tools to support creation of components, either by 3rd parties, or simply to be shared locally among a group of developers.
Open architecture: To support not only component building and data communications, but also tools and add-ins to the development environment.
Better reporting and data analysis capability: For example Delphi's Decision Cube, Tee Chart and Quick Reports components.
Application management: The run-time management of the multi tier system where multiple workstations access multiple databases through multiple (possibly mirrored) business processes. It is this area is in which Borland's Sydney developers are working.
AS400 support: IBM predicts a growth of 30% in the AS400 market over the next 12 months. The market is currently very poorly serviced by development tools. The new Delphi/400 product will support access to an AS400 back end via PC terminals using the existing Delphi data access architecture. Currently Delphi/400 doesn't support multi-tier, but this is "on the drawing board". (Sneak preview announcement: C++ Builder for AS400 will be announced in the next few weeks)
The new features of Delphi 3 will be in the next version of C++ Builder and should also carry through to J Builder. MIDAS will also appear in all these products. However, Delphi will remain the "flagship product" with new technologies always appearing there first.
Borland is also working to provide a common development environment for all of its products. Witness the similarity of C++ Builder to Delphi, and J Builder will also be modelled on the same lines.
Intrabuilder 1.5: This new version is about to ship, providing an improved point and click method of building a Web capable application very quickly.
Borland Professional Services: Training courses and on-site mentoring where Borland people will attend a client on a regular basis to provide guidance, without actually doing the development itself.
Borland is also working on ways to interface Delphi with other proprietary products. For example there is work in progress to interface Delphi with SAP. The idea is to break into "closed" environments where developers are keen to have alternatives to the restrictive (and expensive) proprietary product.

At this point Ray took a number of questions:

Q: Is mentoring available to small clients, of say 10 to 50 staff, and is it available in Melbourne.
RB: Yes, and although Borland staff will be based in Sydney they can come down to Melbourne for training and mentoring.

Q: Will the C++ Builder compile time be speeded up?
RB: Yes it will continue to improve.

Q: When is Delphi 4 coming out?
RB: Some time next year.

Q: When will Borland start making money?
RB: Profits are forecast for this year, hopefully starting this quarter. The Australian operation has been profitable since 1995.

Q: How does Borland feel about the recent poaching of Delphi staff by Microsoft?
RB: Most of them are not missed, except for Anders, but he wasn't working that closely on the later versions of Delphi anyway. The lawsuit was mainly aimed at stopping further poaching activity.

Q: How do you feel about those poached staff possibly working on Visual Basic?
RB: (Emphatically) I can assure you they aren't working on VB.

[Ray explained that Borland enjoys a good relationship with Microsoft at the R&D level. With just a touch of satisfaction he told us that VB5 was partly developed in, you guessed it, Delphi and Microsoft's response was simply that "it was the best tool for the job".]

Q: Is it true that MIDAS technology incurs run time licence charges, even if you buy the client-server version of Delphi?
RB: Yes, the list price is $A6250 per server, but for small VARs the price may be negotiable.

Q: What about cross-platform development?
RB: Only J-builder will be truly cross-platform. But note that Delphi 4 will be able to use Java Beans components.

Q: Will we see a Delphi for Windows CE?
RB: The CE market is not big enough (yet?) for Delphi. Borland will be watching and waiting.

Q: I hear that Intrabuilder is for Intranets only, can I also use if for Internet applications?
RB: Intrabuilder is also fine for Internet apps.

Q: When should I use Intrabuilder as opposed to Delphi 3?
RB: Intrabuilder is a lot easier to use and is suitable for applications where data is mainly being presented to the user, with input only via a simple form interface. For more interactive applications you will want to use Delphi 3. Note however that you can develop an ActiveX in D3 and host it in Intrabuilder, thus getting the benefits of each.

 

Judging by the hearty and spontaneous applause at the end of Ray's talk, it was extremely well received by a very appreciative audience. In short it was an excellent mix of technical tid bits with a clear view of where Borland are heading. Many thanks Ray!

The meeting closed early at around 8:00pm to allow time for a quick committee meeting, before moving on to the post-meeting dinner at the Rosati Restauraunt. About 12 people made it to the dinner and it was a good opportunity to get some interesting industry gossip from Ray. Sorry, you had to be there to hear it ;-)

Committee meeting minutes are available to ADUG members from the ADUG Secretary.