Borland looks to take on Visual Studio with Diamondback

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Borland Software with the planned Diamondback release of its Delphi tool for Windows applications is looking to take on Microsoft while accommodating .Net, Win32, and Delphi development, a Borland official said Monday at the BorCon conference here.  

With Diamondback Borland expects to compete with Microsoft’s Visual Studio tool, said Michael Swindell, Borland director of product management for developer tools. He cited productivity improvements in touting the tool’s strengths. “You’ll be faster and more productive in Diamondback, that’s what our goal is,” Swindell said.

Diamondback is in limited beta release now; no general availability timeframe has been revealed yet by Borland. The product combines development on the Win32, Delphi, and .Net platforms, accommodating legacy Windows and new application development, according to Swindell.

“We have a lot of developers moving to .Net, but a lot of our developers are not completely there yet,” Swindell said. “They still have a lot of life left in their Win32 applications.”

Developers can add features and quality to existing applications while also moving to .Net, he said. By supporting ASP.Net, Diamondback enables developers to take advantage of Microsoft’s managed code concepts for secure, manageable code, Swindell noted.

With Diamondback, users do not need separate development environments for C# and Delphi, Swindell said. “All of the team members can share the Delphi environment,” he said.

A host of other improvements also await Diamondback users. “Our goal was to really make developers’ daily lives easier, better, faster,” Swindell said.

Code re-factoring enables users to make global, cascading changes to code. Developers, for example, can rename an object once and it is reflected throughout the source code. “Code re-factoring helps [developers] maintain their source code, whether it is writing their new applications or maintaining their existing code,” said Swindell.

One conference attendee expressed curiosity about the time-saving possibilities of code re-factoring. “That’s amazing, to be honest,” said Johan Vorster, a software developer at Tower Systems International, a Melbourne, Australia developer of point-of-sale systems.

The code editor in Diamondback has been improved to flag errors on the fly. Code re-factoring will correct errors as well, Swindell said.

Additionally, Diamondback is fused with Borland’s StarTeam project management system, with a StarTeam client embedded within the Diamondback IDE. “[Users will] be able to monitor and enter change requests,” and compare different versions of code to reject or accept changes, Swindell said.

Unit testing in Diamondback enables creation of tests for developers to use on their code. “That’s very useful [to] a developer, just for testing my own code, just for building better quality code. But it’s also very useful for handing off [the code] to a formal testing environment,” Swindell said.

Diamondback’s history manager automates backups of developer files, so code is not lost.

ADO.Net, which is Microsoft’s .Net framework for database connectivity, has been encapsulated within the rapid application development layer in Diamondback, enabling the use of different types of databases and easier building of multi-tier database applications, said Swindell. Also, data migration, for moving data between different databases, is built into Diamondback.

Web development in Diamondback is being improved to enable developers to deliver video or audio onto a Web page.

The more scalable ECO II Model Powered Framework is featured in Diamondback. ECO, which stands for Enterprise Core Objects, provides a model-driven architecture for .Net, in which applications are diagrammed and objects are created automatically.

“The benefit is that we can build applications with ECO much faster and they’re very highly maintainable with far less code,” Swindell said. ECO in Diamondback features a multi-tier architecture and provides application server-like functionality for .Net. 

Earlier in the day at BorCon, Microsoft’s Rick LaPlante, general manager of the Visual Studio Team System, touted May 2004 research figures that he said show Microsoft’s .Net is becoming the primary development platform in 56 percent of shops, as opposed to 44 percent for the rival Java J2EE platform. A Sun Microsystems representative contacted afterward countered with research that says Java will continue to lead over .Net in IT shops.

LaPlante also echoed Borland concerns that software projects are going awry because of differing perspectives in organizations. Developers can find themselves working on projects they believe are doomed while management thinks the projects are going great, he said.

Changing of features is a particular problem, with developers needing “bake time” for features, LaPlante said. “That’s pretty hard to do when features are constantly changing,” LaPlante said.

He also touted the Microsoft application platform, which features Office and Windows on the client, BizTalk Server for business process management, SQL Server for data storage, System Center for management and security, and Windows Server as the core platform. Delphi users will be able to leverage the planned SQL Server 2005 database release, which features SOAP-based access to data, he said.

Additionally, users of the Borland CalibreRM requirements management platform will be able to use it in conjunction with Microsoft’s planned Team Foundation server component, which is set to provide source code control, item tracking, and project management in the Visual Studio Team System package.