Borland Kylix 2 review

Kylix is Borland's RAD (Rapid Application Development) tool for Linux and a close cousin of its Windows Delphi product. When I looked at Kylix 1 (see enterprise, issue 81, p236), I remarked that 'developers are already tapping their fingers waiting for the first service pack... possibly Kylix has been released too early.' Remarkably, even now Borland hasn't released any certified Service Pack for Kylix, although the release code for the second version is in my hands. This is little comfort to developers who purchased the first version of Kylix and have yet to get value from it because of its software faults.

It certainly seems that Kylix falls some way behind JBuilder and Windows Delphi in Borland's list of priorities. Interestingly, Borland hasn't published any Kylix sales figures, but the initial launch was sufficiently disappointing that the company drastically reduced the price early in its life. Optimists may say that development tools take a while to establish, and Linux is still in an early phase of adoption, especially on the desktop. A debugged Kylix could grow dramatically on the back of Linux growth. The pessimistic view is that Linux will never prosper as a desktop operating system, so the fast GUI-building tools in Kylix are of little relevance. And for server applications, there's too much competition, with enterprise-class applications going to Java, and small-scale projects leaning towards PHP, Perl, Java (again) or some other technology.

Bugs and marketing aside, Kylix is still a great achievement. In its Windows incarnation, Delphi is a formidable development tool that beats Visual Basic 6 in most respects. For Kylix, Borland ported the IDE to Linux and created a cross-platform version of its component library, using Trolltech's Qt widget set. Using the CLX (Component Library for Cross-platform) components, it's possible to build applications that compile under both platforms. Although CLX is a rich library, the cross-platform capability breaks if Delphi developers call on Windows features like the rich text control, the ADO data API, Internet Explorer components, ActiveX controls or any COM services.

The first Kylix release came in two for-sale editions, Desktop and Server. The free Kylix Open is a trial edition and also allows open-source development under the GPL (GNU General Public License). Although it was promised for version one, Kylix Enterprise is only now being made available. Enterprise is the product that integrates Kylix with Borland's application server, a CORBA-based platform built around the VisiBroker ORB (Object Request Broker).

Web Services

For most developers, the big new feature in Kylix 2 is Web Services, although it's a shame that Borland has chosen to limit this feature to the Enterprise version. What it offers is the ability to create client and server applications that communicate over HTTP using SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) - an XML standard for invoking remote objects. For example, you can write a Delphi server application that uses Microsoft SQL Server and publish one or more interfaces as a Web Service. A Kylix client can then easily invoke those interfaces without requiring a Linux database driver for SQL Server. Of course, you could also do this with a browser-based Web application, but the Kylix approach lets you build a rich, native-code client that's able to do local processing. In another scenario, you could distribute a Delphi client application to your customers and have it call Kylix Web Services over the Internet as part of its functionality.