[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote on Thursday, 17 November 2005 3:29 p.m.: >> That's why I'm hoping for robust Kylix support in D2006, and native >> expansion into the smaller hardware. >> That's what we need for continued relivency. > > There's no kylix support for 2006. Kylix failed miserably. Cost > borland millions of dollars and set back Delphi development 6-12 > months.
To my mind, the problems with Kylix were: Firstly, Borland may have been marketing to the wrong people. If Borland expected anyone to move from existing Free Software tools available on Linux to Borland ones they were being extremely optimistic. The people that they ought to have been targeting were people already developing Windows software who wanted to make their applications genuinely cross-platform. Following from the above, the split between CLX and the VCL was too great. There is too much work involved in trying to port an application that makes heavy use of the VCL to CLX - they are quite different and CLX is much more limited. Had it been much easier, it would have been cheap for a company with even a minor interest in providing a Linux version of their software to do so. I believe a version of the VCL that runs on Linux would be technically possible, and would certainly have made it a lot easier to port existing VCL-based applications to Linux (and after that, maintaining the cross-platform nature of the application). Of course the problem then would be 3rd-party VCL components where the source was not available - they would not be usable without a Win32 API compatibility layer such as wine / winelib (which has not been ready to the degree that it would have needed to be until relatively recently, however had the project been sponsored in a major way by Borland then who knows how much further ahead they could have been). Then, having developed Kylix, which in itself was a good product, Borland did not continue developing it to keep up with the changes to the Linux platform. Linux has a very fast pace of development and after a while, applications built in Kylix simply did not look and feel as nice as ones built natively (I am mostly referring to those using Qt / KDE libraries). Of course by this stage I imagine Borland had unofficially abandoned Kylix development anyway. I concede perhaps that Borland may have been too far ahead of the market and that perhaps the world was not ready for desktop Linux at the time Kylix was released, but I believe we are now at the stage were Linux on the desktop is a viable alternative in many situations, and Delphi developers still don't yet really have an easy way to port their applications to Linux. Cheers, Paul --------------------------------------------------------- Paul Eggleton Ph: +64-9-4154790 Software Developer Fax: +64-9-4154791 CJN Technologies Ltd. DDI: +64-9-4154795 http://www.cjntech.co.nz Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------- [Disclaimer: any opinions expressed in this message are my own and not those of my employer] _______________________________________________ Offtopic mailing list [email protected] http://ns3.123.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/offtopic
