Borland Software's latest suite of development tools will take on
Microsoft's Visual Studio .net, claimed Borland Canada president
John Fisher.
Borland initially announced at its annual conference last May the
Galileo (Delphi for .net) suite as a "platform-agnostic" offering
that allows developers to create .net applications written in
Pascal or Java.
The new offering - to be released early 2003 - features the latest
version of its popular Delphi programming and development tool
along with other languages. Galileo will not create .EXEs or
Dynamic Link Libraries (DLLs) but will produce the language of
Microsoft .net in Common Intermediate Language (CIL) code.
Fisher claimed that more than over one million developers use
Delphi.
".net is emerging as a really strong alternative for enterprise
application development. It has the potential to deliver the
promise that Microsoft's been talking about for a long time - the
scalability, security and distributed systems that's everyone is
looking for," Fisher said.
Delphi for .net will be a fully-fledged pure .net development
environment, he added.
Fisher said the suite of tools is designed to be a serious
alternative for developers, who fear that by adopting Visual
Studio.net they will be forced to use Microsoft software such as
Exchange Server and SQL Server database exclusively.
"Potentially there will be somewhere between four and five million
developers who will eventually move to .net," Fisher said. But most
companies are not solely using Microsoft, Fisher said, adding that
Borland supports mixed environments and both the J2EE and .net
platforms.
"There are a lot of companies that don't want to be stuck in a
stack," Fisher said. "I don't think we'll be number one in .net
development but I think that we will be a strong number two in that
area," he added.