Yesterday, I received an e-mail from CodeGear that the new Delphi platform has been released (or here for fancy images). A bit expensive and I fear for the future of the Delphi environment: notice how the environment now closely seems to mimic the Visual Studio IDE. If you need to create genuine (native) Win32 applications, I guess there are only 2 viable languages left: Object Pascal and C++.
Back in the days, Alfons and I (and many others) wondered why the makers of Turbo Pascal never considered standardizing the language: At that point, Alfons turned to C++ while I decided to focus on Delphi. Later on, on a professional level, I made the decision to leave Delphi and go on the SQL, C and Uniface route. That was the best decision I ever made in my career: first of all I was seriously thrown in the deep. Secondly, I learned to love VMS, and (from then on) other Unices.
But going back to CodeGear: I see that they released their PHP for Delphi product, which appears to be the Delphi IDE geared to create PHP websites (it doesn’t generate executables, no). It includes the (so called) PHP VCL. Right, the point of that is?1.
And maybe that’s the problem I have with older Borland products: They are generally good products and obviously, Delphi is one of them. But, the main question is, where is the roadmap (Missing roadmap from the CEO’s notes)?
1 I see that the PHP VCL has been open-sourced under the LGPL.