> On 24-Jul-2008 11:50:15, Firebird-general@yahoogroups.com wrote:
> I ask because I think Delphi's general usage is already shrinking and
> I feel like it is only going to continue to do so. If Delphi does
> continue to shrink I was wondering what effect that will have on
> Firebird's growth.

I am only hearing that Delphi is shrinking in the corporate developer
community. This would be best measured by the number of employment
opportunities or contract jobs available in that sector. Our company which
is an ISV was a recent adopter of Delphi as a language of choice. We only
took it on in about 2002 and are very happy we did. The grass isn't that
greener on the other side, particularly in our line of work. We develop
shrinkwrapped applications and spent decades in other technologies where
greedy language/IDE companies charged runtime license fees for the rights to
just compile your code in their compilers. Or that they were bundled with
'frameworks' that weighed 5x more than our code did, and yet we were forced
to have to bundled all of it together to ship a product.

So I would say that if you have a conversation with corporate IT developers,
you might find them showing little or no interest in Delphi as a technology,
unless they already have a vested interest in it. But if you talk to ISVs
who's bread & butter is on producing tight applications for sale to the
general public, I don't think you'll find as much 'doom & gloom' in their
conversations regarding Delphi - more than likely you'll find optimism.
There are a lot of big players still using Delphi for their core products,
and I think this is supported by Embarcadero's interest in purchasing the
asset.

Like Delphi, I see Firebird seeing the positive swing on this too. The fact
that its one of a handful of truly FREE and powerful SQL databases that
ISV's can bundle with their software means that we should be seeing more and
more of it appearing as embedded databases in products. I run across it all
the time. We just bought some new web site monitoring software from
Paessler (a German software company) and I was surprised to find Firebird
bundled with it as the database of choice for that product. I suspect the
product itself was probably developed in Delphi as well.

So I think the 'shrinking' usage of Delphi isn't affecting as many parts of
the software developer community as you might think. Sure, if my bread &
butter relied on winning contract programming gigs in Fortune 500
corporations, I probably wouldn't want to specialize in it. But if I want
to build software to sell to people, I'd be pretty happy with Delphi and its
future.

Myles

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Myles Wakeham
Director of Engineering
Tech Solutions USA, Inc.
Scottsdale, Arizona USA
www.techsolusa.com
Phone +1-480-451-7440