Ted Shelton, chief strategy officer for Borland, is one of the industry's truth tellers.
Shelton's candor derives from Borland's position as a Switzerland of the development community. Borland offers popular development tools for both J2EE and Windows--the latter via Delphi, a highly regarded application development system based on Object Pascal. Late last month, ZDNet reported that Borland plans to release an integrated development environment (IDE) for Microsoft .Net, which will be the first full-blown alternative to using Microsoft's own Visual Studio .Net.
Shelton will say little about his forthcoming IDE, other than to note that it will arrive early next year and take full advantage of the .Net application development framework. Not surprisingly, the product will allow .Net apps to be created using Borland's Delphi, but Shelton won't say whether the native Microsoft languages C# and Visual Basic .Net will be supported--only that developers have "asked" Borland to support them. Interestingly, Microsoft fully supports Borland's development of an alternative to Visual Studio .Net, since it helps build momentum for .Net in the developer community.
When talking about the industry, Shelton is much less reticent, offering well-reasoned opinions on the immediate future of application development. I recently spoke with him about the state of Web services and the ongoing struggled between the .Net and J2EE camps, a conflict has threatened to bring Web services to a grinding halt. His observations provide a remarkably clear snapshot of where we are today.
Knorr: When you're in the middle of this Web services thing, it seems like there's nothing happening. But if you look at the last six months--particularly what Microsoft and IBM have been doing with standards--it's pretty amazing how far things have come, isn't it?
Shelton: Yes, technology is still moving fast, which is not always the happiest environment for customers. We did a survey at the Borland developer conference and 50 percent of our developers said they were using Web services in applications they had under development. I think the refinement to that question is what are you using it for--and the answer is entirely behind the firewall, entirely non-mission-critical applications. So we still have to solve performance, reliability, and security before Web services ever amount to the passionate dreams you hear from some players in the marketplace.
I have some concerns when I see the Microsoft and IBM axis presenting standards in competition with the standards that Sun is presenting and the two sides not wanting to cooperate. On the flip side, for a company like Borland that's independent and stands above the fray, some of that actually plays to our strength because we end up being able to help coordinate the interoperability. But in the long run I don't think it's good for the market. The market has to evolve more first.
Will Microsoft and IBM be successful in dictating Web services standards to the marketplace?
I think as a general rule it's a bad idea to bet against either IBM or Microsoft. And so when you combine the two and say, gee, you lost money betting against them individually--you're going to bet against them both together? I wouldn't take that bet. I think there are different definitions of success, though. Are they going to drive adoption of these technologies into certain segments of the marketplace? Yes. Are they going to be the only way that security, say, is going to get done? No.
I am concerned about [Microsoft's and IBM's] decision to change standards organizations with these WS standards and not submit them or continue to work them through royalty-free standards groups. I think there's a problem when you cause people to question their adoption of the technology at the wrong time
Even though there's not a lot of Web services adoption, the Visual Studio .Net tool--which gains functionality every time Microsoft updates one of its enterprise servers to expose its APIs in the development environment--is getting incredibly powerful.
In the non-Microsoft world, there is very little appreciation for how important the developer is to the ultimate success of the platform. The Meta Group just came out with a research note that said they think that there's about a million Java developers in the world. And when they say developers, they mean professional developers who go to work every day and are paid to do their job, as opposed to Sun, which counts probably every student who ever had a Java programming class.
So let's say there's a million, which based on our experience in the marketplace I think is a fair estimate. Something like 80 percent of those people are developers inside the enterprise doing server-side, high-end, enterprise-class solution development. There are very few people who are thinking about how to write an application for a mobile device; there are very few people who are thinking about any sort of rich client, whether for a device or for a desktop; there are very few people who are thinking about departmental-level or SME solutions as opposed to these global class solutions.
So Microsoft walks onto the scene and says, 'We have, basically, Java, but in fact you have this whole panoply of languages you can use.' So they have a much more compelling value proposition across the entire spectrum of mobile, rich client, and SME development. And they're even appealing to the enterprise developer.
Stay tuned for Part Two next Tuesday, when Shelton discusses the .Net threat to the Java community.
Do you think Microsoft and IBM will dictate the standards? E-mail Eric or TalkBack below or e-mail us with your thoughts.
