Borland is reviving a brand that, not only became one of the first programming tools to exploit the power of the PC, but a product that virtually invented the IDE (integrated development environment).
It’s a brand that seasoned developers with over 10 to 15 years experience have fond recollections for its powerful compilers and ease of use. The brand last appeared roughly a decade ago.
The new products, which include Turbo Delphi for Win32, Turbo Delphi for .NET, Turbo C++ and Turbo C#, will be available in two editions: a free Explorer edition, and a $500 Professional edition.
They will come with support for low-end database including MySQL, Microsoft’s free version of SQL Server, and Borland’s Interbase, which is used for legacy dBase and Paradox applications.
They are aimed at a constituency that Borland neglected as it subsequently moved towards enterprise development: first with middleware, and now with application lifecycle management.
On this go round, they are adding the kinds of visual, RAD (rapid application development) features that are now taken for granted in IDEs. And they are expanding on the original object-oriented programming metaphor towards broader components, which are designed as more self-contained units of code with all the necessary interfaces.
The difference between the free Explorer version and the paid-for Professional edition are in the number of components supported.
The free edition supports roughly 200 components out of the box, and is designed for basic tasks by students, hobbyists, and beginners. By contrast, the professional edition is designed to be extensible, adding the ability to utilize third party components and add-ins.
Upgrade options are available for Explorer users through online purchase and download of a software key that unlocks additional features. And Professional users will have upgrade options for Borland’s mainstream Enterprise Studio tools that provide fuller support for all major databases and transaction capabilities.
The Turbo products are aimed at three constituencies: students or individuals who are learning programming, individual professionals or hobbyist programmers, and non-programmers who want to develop applications without having to know the guts of a language.
While it might appear ironic that the company is going to all this trouble just as it is about to ditch the unit, it’s obvious that adding some sparks makes sense to sweeten the pot for the venture’s future owners.
The company expects to finalize plans for a privately funded spin-off by the end of Q3, executing a strategy announced earlier this year as part of then-incoming president and CEO Tod Nielsen’s first moves.
When Borland introduced Turbo Pascal in 1983, it was the first tool that integrated code editor, compiler, and debugger. Since then, developers have always had a warm spot for Borland’s efficient compilers and ease of use.
It led the way for Microsoft to blow the market wide open when it introduced the Windows, client/server Visual Basic tool in the early 1990s.
Yet, even as Turbo Pascal, later superseded by Delphi, was left behind by newer, web-based languages like Java and C#, it still commanded a stubbornly loyal developer base.
Emphasizing the nostalgia element, the press release actually dug up several ex-Borland employees to heap their praises. They included MySQL’s Zack Urlocker, who formerly led product management for Turbo Pascal and Delphi; and Gene Wang, who previously headed Borland’s programming language business.
According to Michael Swindell, senior director of product management for the Borland Developer Tools Group emerging markets, such as in India, China, and Brazil, should prove fertile ground for the revived Turbo line.
In a commodity market, Borland’s strategy for the future spin-off is to emphasize that its tools are easier for novices than what’s already available for free download.
Once the spin-off is complete, Swindell indicated that the developer entity might also look at other emerging languages and frameworks such as Ruby on Rails for future Turbo products.
The revived Turbo line will be released in September.
