From the Trenches
Directions / Commentary
The Dawn of Distributed Computing
As you read this issue of Delphi Informant, hopefully you are in Denver, the site of BorCon98. This annual conference provides a chance to receive technical training, network with fellow developers, and meet some of the people from Inprise. Historically, this is also the time that Inprise paints a picture of what it intends to do for the coming year. The entire conference is surrounded with an air of optimism and enthusiasm for users of Borland products. To add to the ambiance, I thought I’d share my views on why I think distributed computing will be a good thing for developers and Inprise.
Regardless of how you feel about the company’s name change, the focus of Borland/Inprise has been clear over the last eighteen months: Distributed computing is in the spotlight. Products like MIDAS, AppCenter, OLEnterprise, the focus on SAP and AS/400 integration, and the acquisition of Visigenics, are clear examples of commitment to this emerging arena.
These developments were not proposed and developed in a vacuum. The reason paradigm shifts occur in the software development industry is due to programmers who demand more from their compiler vendor, tool, and/or language. Think of it as survival of the fittest for development products. As a result of this Darwinian evolution of development tools, we no longer have to use things like command-line editors and tools. In fact, we have the ability to become even more productive because of things like integrated development environments (IDE), GUI tools, and visual editors. How many people would really rather be using EDLIN instead of a visual editor?
Borland captured the OOP market nine years ago and spurred its growth by remaining on the leading edge of technology. Essentially, an escalating war between language and compiler vendors was fought to regain the ground Borland had clearly taken. Today, it is physically impossible to develop software without seeing some passing reference to OOP. Borland didn’t invent OOP, but they certainly brought it to the forefront.
With the advent and necessity of distributed computing, Inprise has identified the next technology to show as much promise as OOP did. Borland products can continue to both grow and flourish for both small-company development shops and enterprise developers alike, but the reality is that the computer industry has shifted more towards enterprise development, and as a result distributed multi-tier computing.
Rick LeFaivre, Senior Vice President of Research and Development at Inprise, has a write-up of the waves of technology available at http://www.inprise.com/about/executive/rickmultitier.html. The common thread through all these waves is innovation. In each case, both end-users and developers clamored for more, and the development tools industry responded by providing what the developers needed. The shift to distributed computing is no exception.
Distributed computing is viewed by some as a return to mainframe mentality, but I see this as a golden opportunity to share information across previously impassable boundaries. Data can be made available around the world easily using existing infrastructures and at a very reasonable cost. The benefits of this model are many: centralized business logic, thin clients, fault tolerance, and load balancing to name just a few.
The market for developing distributed computing solutions is ready to explode. The dawn of distributed computing is here. You owe it to yourself, and your customers, to find out how distributed computing can make your applications better. Isn’t that what all of us really want?
Dan Miser is a Design Architect for Stratagem, a consulting company in Milwaukee. He has been a Borland Certified Client/Server Developer since 1996, and is a frequent contributor to Delphi Informant. You can contact him at http://www.execpc.com/~dmiser.
Dan Miser shares his views on why he thinks distributed computing will be a good thing for developers and Inprise.
Report on BorCon98 and opinions re: distributed computing.