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Inprise Tries Corba Evangelism
AUGUST 1998

The two big rapid application development tools for Windows--Microsoft's Visual Basic and Inprise's Delphi--have new versions in beta testing. Delphi 4 will probably beat Visual Basic 6 to market by a month or two, but that's not likely to affect many people's buying plans. Tools are such a religious issue with most developers that they'd rather fight than switch.

But every now and then, somebody has a religious conversion. And if the former Borland has any hopes of adding to the ranks of the Delphi faithful from Microsoft's VB flock, there's one bit of dogma that might just do it: cross-platform, multitier applications.

Both VB and Delphi do multitier applications in their latest incarnations. Both can do so using Microsoft's COM-unist architecture (Common Object Model, Distributed COM, COM+ ... whatever it's called this week). Both work with Microsoft Transaction Server, and both have pretty slick data-access capabilities.

But Delphi goes beyond COM, offering Corba as well. Thanks to Inprise's acquisition of Visigenic earlier this year, Delphi has become integrated with the world of Corba--it treats objects registered with Corba's object request brokers as remote components, and even automatically builds the Interface Definition Language required to hook into them.

This hooks into Inprise's master plan, which was revealed to some degree at the Delphi launch event in New York last week--to take the ease of use of the Borland tools lineup to the enterprise. Delphi and the other Borland tools will be paired with a Corba-based application server--Inprise Application Server, to be exact--which will be unveiled in August. And through middleware bridging, Inprise Application Server will also integrate with COM+ and DCE.