DevCo Positive Mood

Several excited blog posts, new hires, and the announcement of the first DevCo Conference add up to the great mood the DevCo startup seems to be in.

The last few days have seen a flurry of blog posts by the new Delphi product manager, Nick Hodges, on his new Borland blog, several posts by Michael Swindell (mostly on JBuilder, but his discussion of how DevCo plans empowering developers one by one certainly applies to Delphi as well), and a very interesting post (as usual) by Allen Bauer. After announcing that Nick joined the company and Jens-Ole' Lauridsen is back, he mentions (with some mystery) a new compiler engineer, which is apparently someone well known by the community.

On BDN there is the announcement of the 2006 conference. Even if date (October/November) and location (Nothern California) the official notice that a conference is in the making and the related call for papers mark another positive sign for DevCo, that for the time of the conference will be a separate company.

Considering all of this, and reading the Borland blogs in particular, anyone can perceive the buzz and the thrill about the new company and its role. Let's hope the new entities come alive ASAP, and all plans will finalize soon: interesting times are coming ahead for "Delphi and company".

New Issue Tracker is OPEN FOR BUSINESS

The Firebird Project is pleased to announce that the new Jira Issue Tracker is open for business. Take your time to work your way around the interface, check existing issues and prepare to post any all-new ones.

Firebird bug trackers are now based on JIRA

Firebird Project: In order to provide additional and much needed functionality to assist in tracking project issues, the existing Sourceforge bug trackers are being replaced with a new tracker based on JIRA. The new tracker will be hosted on a new server and will be using Firebird as its database engine. To facilitate this migration, all of the Sourceforge Trackers have been closed. Once the migration has been completed (a couple of days), a message will be posted providing the URL links for the new tracker site. Dimitrios Chr. Ioannidis and Pavel Cisar should be thanked for their work on the configuration of the new server, the installation and configuration/implementation of the new tracker and migration of the existing data.

Firebird Website Moves to new House

Finally we have moved to our new server in Canada, thanks to the generosity of Broadview Software. More news shortly about our other new server, running a Firebird back-end and our new tracker system. [Ed: this server is way faster than sf.net watch the Alexa’s Site Stats ]

Nick joins DevCo & Delphi Team

Nick Hodges, long time Delphi fellow, is the new Delphi Product Manager for the soon-to-be DevCo. A great opportunity for him, the company, and the entire Delphi community.

Nick discusses his new job (and his great mood) in a post in his blog. He has also an irresistible post in the non-tech group:

" B orland finally went and hired a new Delphi Product Manager. He seems a pretty cool guy. Oh, wait, it's me!"

Is Nick a good choice for the job? Indeed. He is part and will remain part of the community, knowns a lot about the product, has great connections with all of the key players and team members... so he'll certainly be able to serve Delphi need to get back in the hand of more and more developers and students, find its place in software companies and universities alike... and also serve the community helping DevCo to improve the products to better serve its users (and not some "disconnected" analysts).

New job

Yesterday, June 19th, was last day of my USAID TAMP job. It was great experience for me...

My next job will be USAID TARA, and I will start at July 3 ;-)

Go Delphi! Go Firebird!

Back!

I had a surgery last monday, had gall stone removed.
I am recovering fast, so expect some posts these days ;-)

Skype, yeah it too is written in Delphi

posted by Steve Trefethen

"I've seen this mentioned before but since I just posted about Yahoo's Go for TV I figured what the heck, might was well throw Skype into the mix too. Skype is only slightly harder to recognize as being written in Delphi but only because they've decided to package the whole application up into a single 18MB EXE btw, isn't it nice how Delphi gives you that option. If you search for strings in the Skype.exe you'll see lots of Delphi classnames like TInterfacedObject and friends.

Inevitably, the question "Can you point me to any well known large Delphi applications out there?" comes up time and again on the public newsgroups. Well, I think Skype.exe weighing in at 18MB and worth $2.6 Billion answers that question wouldn't you agree?"

Yahoo Go for TV, yeah it's written in Delphi

posted by Steve Trefethen

"Today I was searching for this old project called myHTPC which used to be located here but now redirects you here. So I downloaded and installed Yahoo Go for TV and low and behold rtl70.bpl, vcl70.bpl and vclx70.bpl sitting right in c:\Program Files\Yahoo!\Yahoo! Go for TV. In case you're not familiar with Delphi these files are part of the redistributable portion of the Delphi runtime."

FirebirdClient v2.0 Release Candidate 5 released

FirebirdClient v2.0 Release Candidate 5 is available for download.

Hope this can be the last Release Candidate version before the final
release, of course, if there are no big issues reported in the next weeks.

Download information can be found here:

· Release Candidate 5 ( 2006-06-01 ) ·

[See remaining text…]

( Please review the changelog for details )

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed bug #1490166.
• Fixed bug #1489770.
• Fixed bug in Domains schema.
• Added the information of the of IscException’s errors to the errors collection.
• Fixed incorrect number of bytes per character in the UTF-8 character set information.
• Fixed FbDataReader.GetEnumerator method to allow the Reader to be closed with CommandBehavior.CloseConnection

Changes:

• Changed GetIPAdressMethod to use IPAddress.Parse with the Data Source when getting an exception with Dns.GetHostEntry.
• Changes on Dispose implementations of FbDataReader, FbCommand and FbConnection classes.
• Added a minor hack to the FbParameter.Size property to try to ha a better detection of Clob parameters
• Added initial support for connection string property synonyms in the DDEX provider.

Some more DevCo info

Allen Bauer had the honor of being interviewed by Huw Collingbourne, the editor of Bitwise Magazine.

FB 2.0 release notes in HTML

The release notes of Firebird 2.0 is now available in HTML format here.

Deconstructing databases with Jim Gray

Jim Gray is one of the nestors of database engineering and currently a MS 'distiguished engineer'. In a Reg interview he speaks about transactions in internet-scale distributed systems and about using graphical processors for parallel processing of streams.
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Morfik defends its IP rights against Google

ZDNet writes: "A couple of weeks ago Google released its Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and almost immediately there were rumors of an alliance between Google and Morfik, the Web OS vendor which has a Javascript converter as one of its main products. The reason? GWT bore more than a casual resemblance to Morfik... " By the way, the developer Journal #4 has a write-up about Morfik and its use of Firebird.

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