Nope, I'm not going to join the battlefield, I just have a comment on
something Jason wrote about a week ago (I didn't read it until today):

>I'll admit I am biased... I'd like to see the community rally around IBO as
>the defacto suite of components for working with
>Delphi/CPPB/etc./Firebird/Etc. I think it is for the greatest good of the
>whole.

Well, the community seem to be split in that respect and I want to take a
guess as to what may be the reasons:

1) Some people are used to IBX or other connectivity components. If it
fulfils their needs, I can well understand why they don't investigate the
alternatives. Most programmers are faced with demands for writing programs
that work, not programs that have the most elegant and efficient design.

2) Myself, I'm a lazy programmer. I write what I have to write and let IBO
do the rest. It suits me brilliantly. But not all programmers are like me
and some want to control everything themselves. Such programmers may get
annoyed at what IBO does behind the scenes - they want to do things a
special way and fight IBOs inherent simplicity rather than take advantage
of it. These programmers could enjoy IBO if they understood its source
code, but they never get familiar with the several hundred thousand lines
of code and ditch IBO.

3) IBO has a lot of components and properties and people may get
discouraged by simply trying to count them! It isn't evident that most of
them are irrelevant for newbies and that a handful of components and a
dozen properties is enough to get started.

Nothing can be done with point 1, these people will continue to use other
connectivity components as long as they fulfil their needs. Point 2 may be
addressed by getting hold of a program that was attempted converted to IBO
by one of these "do everything myself dudes" and with that as a starting
point write a tutorial about how to delete unnecessary code to improve
performance. Point 3 is already covered by the Getting Started Guide. I
guess some people also may be scared off by the frequent updates and bug
fixes, but the annual Best Database Connectivity Award (if I'm not
mistaken, IBO is the only ever winner of that award) ought to destroy any
belief in it being buggy software.

I guess the ibobjects list would have been a more appropriate place to send
this mail, but since it is part of a fairly active thread at IBDI I'm
sending it here.

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