Borland today announced it will not divest DevCo but run it as a separate division within Borland. The new division will be called CodeGear. The main reason given for the change of plans is that currently the financials of DevCo could not adequately be separated out from the ALM business. See here for details.
I’ve placed the first book of a Firebird 2.0 manual on-line:
http://www.janus-software.com/fbmanual/
This book is about the stored procedure and trigger language “PSQL” and
consists of about 100 web pages. I would expect that all 8 planned
books will be online before the end of the year.
The on-line manual is user editable, in the sense that users can post
extra information, examples and corrections — in the style of the on-
line PHP manual.
All feedback is welcome.
Enjoy!
Paul
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.
Read more here
Oracle has last year's report as well, with even more detail. It shows Borland as a quickly growing database company, riding the FB/IB success wave. It's database sales are closely tracking MySQL, with 2004 sales already at the $9 million mark.
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Morfik developed the breakthrough web app RAD tool, WebOS. WebOS generates AJAX web applications in an environment that resembles Delphi C/S development. It uses Firebird as its DB server. One important part of its technology is “JST”, a javascript compiler. Google has released a similar technology, perhaps licensed from Morfik.
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The leadership team of DevCo includes: Nigel Brown, Michael Swindell, Steve Todd, Alan Bauer, Ben Netick, and David Intersimone. They have 3-year roadmaps for Delphi, JBuilder, and Interbase. The size of DevCo will be ~250-300 at the start, i.e. about 20% of Borland's workforce. "Develop" has $100 mln in sales, about 30% of the total. Sounds like "DevCo" will be quite profitable from the start.
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Marten Mikos says that 40% of MySQL is on Windows. Taking an installed base of 5 mln, this means about 2 mln on Windows. Firebird is 70..80% on Windows, so >2 mln. Marten further wants to be partners with Microsoft. "Hi Bill, I've just hired Firebird's Jim Starkey to write Falcon and compete with SQLServer head-on. Want to be friends?"
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Arek Heldt has released version 0.0.6 of his Java based GUI admin tool for Firebird and Fyracle. JDBStudio is a database tool written in java thus runnable on many operating systems. It simplifies browsing, editing and querying of databases by providing an intuitive and consistent Graphical User Interface. JDBStudio is an excellent replacement for Oracle SQL*Plus, Microsoft SQL Query Analyzer and tens of other similar tools. Don't be fooled by the low version number.
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ZDNet writes: "Solid Information Technology, a proprietary database vendor will take its solidDB Storage Engine open source, under the GPL, starting in June. Solid has its base in telecommunications and has 3 million copies out at places like Alcatel, Cisco, EMC, HP, NEC, Nokia, and Nortel." The open source part will be another transactional back-end for a MySQL front-end. New developer experience: porting your apps between different back ends of the same database system.
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FB Community News reports:
"The new transaction database was developed by Jim Starkey, a noted database software architect who joined MySQL in February", Urlocker said in an interview at the LinuxWorld conference in Boston. "MySQL recognized that Starkey's Netfrastructure had a full relational database. The database is a jewel in the rough, a new engine with a more modern architecture, oriented for use with large-scale applications." What a nice thing to say about Firebird's design. Users will recognize that Firebird is the polished jewel.
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