[lazarus] BorCon Update

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Tue, 11 Jul 2000, Mike Zambeck wrote:

> Greetings from San Diego.  Thought you all might want to know what's up
> down here...
> 
> 1.  Chairman Dale and Co. seem to have gotten the bug to create
> cross-platform development tools.  Not just win32/linux, but very cross
> platform.

They call it CLX, i think.. there was an announcement of that not so long time ago.

> 
> 2.  They also seem convinced that they can get a large number of VB
> programmers to switch to Delphi with this theme: "Delphi 5 is the quickest
> path to linux app development from VB.

Aaarggghh.... VB programmers coming to linux.. God help us :)

> 
> 3.  They had a couple more demos:
> 
> a.  The componant palette has a few tabs now.
> 
> b.  The quickie demo worked okay.
> 
> c.  They got a database access demo working with db componants and midas
> that worked after a few tries.  Man, the guy doing the demo was bright red
> and sweating bullets while he was having problems :)
> 
> All in all, pretty impressive.  The lady behind me even let out an 'oh my
> god' when the db demo worked.


I don't see what could be so hard about it ? DB access is not the toughest
part, or so it would seem to me, once you have the GUI up and running...

> 
> 4.  I've only attended two linux/kylix sessions but they both had pretty
> low attendance.  Based on chatting with a few attendies, it seems like the
> delphi community at large isn't as excited about kylix as you might think.
> Just my impression after a day...

My idea is that most people probably say 'we'll wait and see when it comes'...

> 
> 5.  No mention of FPC/Lazarus.  That kind of irks me, especially when they
> keep claiming that they're the 'first linux rad tool.'  Who knows, you
> might be first!  I may bring this up to them if I have the opportunity.
> Speaking of scheduling, the party line is 'release when it's finished.'

On a conference in Holland, Charlie Calvert asked who used Free Pascal -
exactly one guy out of 200 put up his hand - the one who reported it to me:)

> 
> If anyone wants me to try to find out anything in particular, send a note
> to me or the list and I'll do my best.

Try to find out what they want with their cross-development library/tools (clx).
My guess is that they'll try to cooperate with TrollTech from the Qt toolkit...

And of course you can always ask:
  'How does all this this compare to Free Pascal ?'
  'Why doesn't borland cooperate more with the FPC/Lazarus team in this C and VB world?'
But I'm not sure that you'll get a friendly reply :)

Especially project Jedi is something of interest for both Borland and FPC !  
I once contacted Charlie Calvert about it, and he seemed interested, but he
never contacted me again afterwards...

Michael.