At this year's Borland International Conference, Philippe Kahn dubbed Borland "the upsizing company," an
offense-is-the-best-defense kind of statement made in response to recent layoffs which downsized the company. His definition of upsizing? "The scaling of PC LAN applications up into secure client/
server solutions." Confused? So was DDJ columnist Al Stevens who, after a day or so, tagged the Orlando experience as the "Borland Client/Server and Database Conference." Still, for the hundreds of programmers who attended the language track of the conference, the news about upcoming Borland plans for 32-bit support, cross-platform development support, local and remote database tools, and a common back end to its C/C++ and Pascal compilers was at least as riveting as the technical presentations and the public-relations mumbo-jumbo.
The conference was divided into five tracks covering dBase, Paradox, Interbase, general issues, and of course, Borland languages. The languages track keynote featured Borland vice president Paul Gross who explained, among other things, the upcoming update to Borland C/C++ 4.0. The toolset will retain its "4.0" version number and be provided free-of-charge to registered Borland users. According to Gross, the update modifies the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to run under 32-bit operating environments including OS/2 2.1, Windows NT, and Chicago. The update also contains improved online documentation, faster load and build times, reduced memory usage, smaller project files, and a new debugging tool called "Just-In-Time-Debugging," which acts much like a post-mortem debugger, trapping fatal errors such as general-protection faults and placing you in the debugger at the point where the error occurred. (To get the update, available on CD or floppy, call 800-645-4559.)
Although Borland C/C++ 4.0 is capable of producing DOS standard- and protected-mode applications, tools such as OWL that are supplied with the compiler only support Windows development. For DOS developers, the recently announced PowerPack for DOS fills in some of the gaps. The PowerPack includes a royalty-free DPMI-compliant DOS extender, Turbo Vision 2.0, and a 32-bit version of its BGI graphics library.
OWL for AppWare was also a topic of conversation at the conference. OWL for AppWare, the result of a joint licensing agreement between Borland and Novell, combines Novell's AppWare Foundation Framework (a library of C functions supporting cross-platform development) with the 200-plus classes supplied in OWL 2.0. According to Gross, OWL for AppWare is designed for portability and will compile under any "modern" C++ compiler--that is, any C++ compiler that supports templates (Borland C++ does, Visual C++ currently does not).
Between keynotes, receptions, and other functions there was little time to relax and enjoy a workshop or two. Among the most popular were sessions discussing the "Obex Enabling Kit"--Borland's answer to MAPI--and "Visual Programming with Borland C++ and OWL 2.0" which added an additional session due to overbooking and unanticipated interest.
Of interest to many developers at the conference was the sneak preview of "Delphi95," which has been kept under tight wraps. "Even Spencer the Cat hasn't seen this," crowed senior product manager Zack Urlocker. As a rapid application development tool, Delphi95 will compete with Visual Basic on the low end and PowerBuilder on the high end. This new visual programming tool, which is based on
Object Pascal, will include access to Borland's Database Engine (BDE), thereby providing access to remote servers supported through IDAPI and ODBC, as well as local Paradox and dBase databases. Unique to Delphi95 is its ability to generate compiled code--similar tools generate intermediate code, which is then interpreted. Therefore, applications are stand-alone and do not require run-time support. Based on the demo I previewed, you will be able to move quickly between visual property and event inspectors and source code--even changes to the source were immediately reflected in the inspectors. Delphi95 will also support VBXs and building custom objects. Borland gave no details on when the product will ship. But don't let the product's code name fool you. Clearly, the visual programming market is already heating up, and competition could get fierce in the next year or two.