Google is continuing its quest to make Google Chrome the next platform for application development.
The new invention is, that if you want to target the Google Chrome platform with your application, but your users don't want to use Google Chrome instead of Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE), you can ask the users to install Google Chrome Frame. It will not affect how MSIE works with other sites, it will only make MSIE activate Google Chrome as a plugin for your online application. This way, it basically works like a flash plugin, Microsoft Silverlight or similar.
Thursday, 24 September 2009
Tuesday, 22 September 2009
Cloud computing deficiencies
If you are considering the use of cloud systems, you may want to read this article about Google App Engine. He may be right or not, but the main problem with Cloud computing is predictability and determinism.
Wednesday, 16 September 2009
Delphi in a long term perspective
I've just come back from the Copenhagen conference with Jim McKeeth. The main topic was Delphi Prism, but also a bit of Delphi 2010. It was a very nice event, Jim presented the topic well, David I from Embarcadero and Marc Hoffman from Remobjects joined online, and the Danish distributor was also present with Ole from Nohau. On top of that, we celebrated 20 year anniversary for the Danish user group, and several of the attendees have known the Delphi product range since before Borland got involved.
Looking back in history, the Delphi product line has always had ups and downs. I still remember the switch from Poly Pascal to Turbo Pascal 1.0 - it really seemed like anything else than an improvement, but fortunately Borland quickly added new features that made a huge difference. The entrance into Windows was a catastrophe, Turbo Pascal for Windows was really awful (it was basically a C/C++ like solution, very unproductive). Then, Delphi emerged, and everything was supercool. Similarly, and maybe predictably, the first attempts at doing Linux and Microsoft .net were awful.
Now, Embarcadero's Delphi Prism provides added value compared to Microsoft's tools, and they are able to keep up with the latest Microsoft technologies. They also realized that native Delphi is everything else than dead, and have provided a roadmap that positions Delphi as the best choice for many business models.
It seems that the history has always been that it took a little while to adapt to new surroundings, but it has always been worth waiting for, and if you wrote your code nicely, it could be moved easily. I expect that we can soon take source code, written in 1982 on a CP/M computer using Zilog Z80 CPU, and run it on Google Chrome OS.
Looking back in history, the Delphi product line has always had ups and downs. I still remember the switch from Poly Pascal to Turbo Pascal 1.0 - it really seemed like anything else than an improvement, but fortunately Borland quickly added new features that made a huge difference. The entrance into Windows was a catastrophe, Turbo Pascal for Windows was really awful (it was basically a C/C++ like solution, very unproductive). Then, Delphi emerged, and everything was supercool. Similarly, and maybe predictably, the first attempts at doing Linux and Microsoft .net were awful.
Now, Embarcadero's Delphi Prism provides added value compared to Microsoft's tools, and they are able to keep up with the latest Microsoft technologies. They also realized that native Delphi is everything else than dead, and have provided a roadmap that positions Delphi as the best choice for many business models.
It seems that the history has always been that it took a little while to adapt to new surroundings, but it has always been worth waiting for, and if you wrote your code nicely, it could be moved easily. I expect that we can soon take source code, written in 1982 on a CP/M computer using Zilog Z80 CPU, and run it on Google Chrome OS.
Innovation in programming languages mess up the syntax
The amount of new features that go into programming languages these days, is extraordinary. There is no doubt, that the demand for multi-core programming requires innovation, but the widespread use of garbage collection also introduces new possibilities, like LINQ. Few programming tools introduce new methods at the same pace as Delphi Prism.
We may see a kind of survival of the fittest amongst all the methods, making some features survive and other not. I'm not sure that the parallel keyword in Delphi Prism has a great future - simply because parallelism shouldn't be done on a low level but on a high level, which is already nicely supported using anonymous methods. It's a kind of race, where errors are made, and one of the biggest errors is probably that many of the features introduce complexity in the language syntax, raising the learning barrier for new programmers. Personally, I very much dislike the use of "+=" for adding a handler in .net, simply because "+=" does not contain any explanatory information, like letters would. It gets much worse when you want to remove a handler, where you use "-= new". It is not intuitive to remove a handler by creating an object. If operators can be used for anything, why limit yourself to operators that already exist? Why not introduce a new "+==+" operator for something? It reminds me of the international obfuscated C code programming contest. Aspect Oriented Programming, LINQ, .net lambda expressions etc. all introduce new syntax elements, that don't look like things we have seen before. When some of these new features eventually become less used, we still have to support them, just like the "object" keyword is still supported by Delphi, even though OOP was changed with Delphi 1.
Anonymous methods and many of the new features are really cool, but in a few years it will likely be possible to design new, simple programming languages from scratch, which implement the most used features in a much nicer way. It may even be possible to create a low-complexity language like PHP or Python, that performs well and has most of these new features, is cross platform etc., becoming the preferred choice for new programmers. It will be interesting to see how programming language support for NUMA will evolve, when one piece of data cannot be accessed equally well by all threads in your app.
We may see a kind of survival of the fittest amongst all the methods, making some features survive and other not. I'm not sure that the parallel keyword in Delphi Prism has a great future - simply because parallelism shouldn't be done on a low level but on a high level, which is already nicely supported using anonymous methods. It's a kind of race, where errors are made, and one of the biggest errors is probably that many of the features introduce complexity in the language syntax, raising the learning barrier for new programmers. Personally, I very much dislike the use of "+=" for adding a handler in .net, simply because "+=" does not contain any explanatory information, like letters would. It gets much worse when you want to remove a handler, where you use "-= new". It is not intuitive to remove a handler by creating an object. If operators can be used for anything, why limit yourself to operators that already exist? Why not introduce a new "+==+" operator for something? It reminds me of the international obfuscated C code programming contest. Aspect Oriented Programming, LINQ, .net lambda expressions etc. all introduce new syntax elements, that don't look like things we have seen before. When some of these new features eventually become less used, we still have to support them, just like the "object" keyword is still supported by Delphi, even though OOP was changed with Delphi 1.
Anonymous methods and many of the new features are really cool, but in a few years it will likely be possible to design new, simple programming languages from scratch, which implement the most used features in a much nicer way. It may even be possible to create a low-complexity language like PHP or Python, that performs well and has most of these new features, is cross platform etc., becoming the preferred choice for new programmers. It will be interesting to see how programming language support for NUMA will evolve, when one piece of data cannot be accessed equally well by all threads in your app.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)