Kylix review

Kylix, Borland's new development tool, is an intriguing twist in the Linux story. Borland's fortunes were built on an excellent range of programming language products for DOS and then Windows. The OWL (ObjectWindows Library) was a more elegant class library than MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes), but relentless marketing for Visual C++ and MFC made OWL an also-ran. Borland responded with Delphi, touted on its 1995 launch as a Visual Basic killer. It was then and still is a superb product, combining the productivity of VB with the performance and flexibility of Visual C++. Key features include its object-orientated Pascal language, full native code compilation, extensible visual component library, and a RAD interface builder superficially similar to VB. Unfortunately for Borland, Delphi's high quality wasn't enough to unseat Microsoft's Visual Studio as the tool of choice for most Windows developers. Delphi built up a community of loyal and satisfied developers, but never much dented Microsoft's market share.

The history is important, because it explains why Borland concluded that it couldn't grow in the Windows market and instead pushed into Java and now Linux. Simply put, Kylix is Delphi for Linux, and it lowers the barriers of entry for custom application development. It's a complete RAD package and targets everything from rich database clients to server-side Web applications. There's also the prospect of cross-platform code that can be compiled for both Linux and Windows, although this won't be realised until the release of Delphi 6. Borland hopes that in-house corporate developers and independent solution providers will use Kylix to offer tailor-made applications that exploit the economy and stability of the Linux platform.

Linux is already a developer-friendly operating system. It's a leading platform for Web applications using what's become known as LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP), along with other resources such as Perl, Python and Java. For native code applications, Linux has an excellent C++ compiler (GNU C++), and there's no shortage of ancillary tools such as editors and debuggers. There's also a fine source code management system, CVS (Concurrent Versions System). Nevertheless, Kylix brings something new to Linux, which is rapid application development with few compromises. The Kylix advantage counts more when building rich clients as opposed to server-side programming, so the success of Kylix will in part measure or even drive the acceptability of Linux on the desktop. In many scenarios, a workstation armed with StarOffice, Netscape Navigator and a Kylix application for access to the corporate database will meet all the requirements for productive work. With Microsoft's Outlook Web Access, you can even log onto an Exchange server. Kylix may assist Linux in its desktop ambitions.

Getting started

Kylix is officially supported on recent Red Hat, Mandrake and SuSE distributions. It requires a minimum of kernel 2.2, glibc 2.2 or a patched glibc 2.1.2, and libjpeg 6.2. Patches for supported distributions appear on the CD. Once installed, Kylix applications will run in the IDE but not standalone, until you add the run-time libraries to LD_LIBRARY PATH. It might also be necessary to edit the Kylix database driver configuration file, to specify the correct dynamic library for your system. Overall, it isn't as painless as installing Delphi on Windows, nor too demanding for a developer. The Kylix IDE makes use of Winelib (Wine Is Not an Emulator), a library that speeds porting by mapping Windows API calls to Linux, but neither Kylix nor its applications require Wine. More fundamentally, the Kylix component library requires Trolltech's Qt, a library of graphical widgets that runs on both Windows and Linux. This dependency exists at run-time as well as design time. Both Wine and Qt are installed seamlessly by Kylix and won't conflict with any pre-existing versions.