JBuilder and Delphi are alive and well

Competitors of JBuilder, Delphi, and other Borland IDE products would have you believe that these are suddenly dead products and you should abandon them immediately. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Just recently the IDE team came out with Delphi 2006, a major upgrade to its turbo-charged Windows development environment. Many popular programs such as the MySQL database administrator were created with Delphi. Also a new Eclipse-based version of JBuilder is expected to be demoed at EclipseCon 2006.

David Intersimone ("David I") Vice President, Developer Relations and Chief Evangelist at Borland wrote in an open letter to the development community,

"The goal is to create a standalone business focused on advancing individual developer productivity using the people inside Borland who are focused on the success of these award winning products."

So all that's happened is that Borland is spinning off its IDE business into a separate company so that the "Borland" company can concentrate on big ticket application lifecycle products. David himself is one the folks at Borland who will follow the tools to their new home. He writes:

"I’m really excited to be moving to the new company. We’ve got the right team members, we’ve got the tool and component partner eco-system, we have the authors, trainers, consultants, and we have the most important part – a loyal community. … I want to assure all of you that we are here in Scotts Valley, and around the world, working on future versions of Delphi, JBuilder and our other products. We are still listening to your needs, issues, and suggestions. We are tracking with the new platform initiatives for Windows, .NET, Java, open standards, and emerging technologies that you want to leverage."

That doesn't sound like a dead product to me. To the contrary, David writes:

"This is not the shutting down of a product line, but the empowering of it. This move is in the best interests of our customers, company, and community."