Dateline: June, 2001.
Alice in Linuxland
Delphi has been around for a long time and has been growing in popularity all the while. Over the past couple of months (or years) Borland has put an awful lot of effort into something referred to as "a high-performance Linux application-development environment that will support C, C++, and Delphi development."
You might think that all serious Linux applications should be written using the C compiler. However, this is not the case. Now, you can write advanced Linux programs in a fraction of the time.
Kylix is the first high-performance RAD tool for Linux, enabling developers familiar with the tools to build native Linux applications and for Windows applications built with them to be ported to Linux relatively easily.
This review is aimed toward Delphi developers who are preparing to code cross-platform applications. If you are a newcomer and you've never even seen Delphi, please find out about Kylix and about Delphi.
Inside the Box
Kylix comes in two flavours: the Desktop developer edition and the Server developer edition. The Server edition contains everything in the Desktop edition plus several additional controls including NetCLX Internet and Apache web development component.
Thanks to Konto (local Borland partner), I got the Kylix Server Developer (review) edition in my mail last month. The box included the following:
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· Kylix Server disk
· Companion Tools disk
· Evaluation version of SuSE v7.0
· Quick Start manual
· Object Pascal Language Guide manual
· Developer's Guide manual
· Object hierarchy poster
· Registration card
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Manuals
This is why I love Borland. The "Quick Start" provides an overwiew of the Kylix development environment to get you started using the product right away. One of the chapters takes you step by step through a creation of a simple text editor application. This manual, surprisingly, contains no installation instructions.
The "Object Pascal Language Guide" describes Pascal as the programming language used on either Linux (Kylix) or Windows (Delphi) operating systems. The programming differences between those two are clearly noted where necessary. This manual is, as always, well-organized and very readable.
The third book, is the "Kylix Developer's Guide". This manual is very comprehensive and covers all the practical aspects of Kylix programming, focusing on specific tasks in many cases but also explaining the concepts behind the examples. Building database applications, writing custom components and creating Internet Web server applications are some of the topics described in this manual.
The Poster
Kylix, like Delphi, is a component based environment. Another reason why I love Borland boxes is the component poster that comes within them. Just a side look at the object hierarchy poster reveals several things: TWinControl is replaced with TWidgetControl ; some new classes such as TQueue, TStack, and TStringHash descend from TOrderedList; there are extra classes having to do with Apache web development; etc.
Kylix Open Edition
Kylix Open Edition is offered as a free download from Borland for developers who wish to use Kylix only for Open Source development. Kylix Open Edition has a GPL-licensed version of CLX, and can only be used to build GPL applications.
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