02 March 2007

Whatever Happened to Borland?

Rather longer ago than I care to think, there was a software company called Borland, run by an ebullient Frenchman by the name of Philippe Kahn. Philippe, I presume, is out sailing his yacht, and Borland still seems to be there. Good to see that one of Borland's best products, Delphi, is also moving into new waters:

Delphi for PHP is the first completely integrated visual Rapid Application Development (RAD) environment for PHP. Delphi’s proven and familiar visual Rapid Application Development (RAD) approach means you are quickly up to speed and productive, without the headaches normally associated with learning a new development environment. The powerful PHP editor and debugger increase coding speed and efficiency, while the integrated VCL for PHP 5 component class library lets you quickly and visually create PHP web applications and integrate PHP open source components.

(Via TheOpenForce.com.)

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the feedback. The team both new ones and the team who has been here for a while are focused on bringing innovation back to Scotts Valley, and this PHP effort as well as the new Delphi for Win32 are two great first steps.

Glyn Moody said...

I look forward to hearing about it.

Anonymous said...

Cool! (but does it run on Linux?)

Seriously. I recently re-implemented a great deal of a fairly large Win-32 application in PHP (without the aid of any RAD environment - just me and a text editor) which was originally developed with Delphi in order to run it on a Linux server because we were having alot of "issues" with the program on the Windows platform. It hasn't failed since. I would have LOVED to have been able to use Delphi for the development process (especially since I could have bought the Delphi code for the original application for a lot less money than the value of the time it took me to re-implement it), but I use Linux exclusively for my development work.

Glyn Moody said...

Not as far as I can tell - maybe Ben Smith (first comment above) would care to clarify the situation if he reads this.

Anonymous said...

Well, its great t see that excellence continues. Philippe Kahn went on to even more fame than Borland by inventing the camera phone and major business successes. He's now into wireless and life sciences according to wikipedia.

Anonymous said...

I can't tell either. I followed the link in your post to the Delphi website, and all the screenshots looked like it was running on XP.

On the encouraging side, the info on that site said that the modules were all pure PHP, so that much would run on Linux. Normally one would expect the IDE itself to be compiled C++ code for a particular platform, but you never know... I really don't see any technical reason why the whole thing couldn't be PHP. An interpreted-on-the-fly language like PHP wouldn't bog down the process of text editing and software development significantly, so why not?

I look forward to seeing if Ben responds to this question. I'll be checking back again.