Craig Stuntz’s Weblog

Embarcadero’s DavidI and Mike Rozlog stopped by the Vertex Systems office on Wednesday to chat with us about Embarcadero’s plans for the near future and David’s personal developer wish list.

They told us about the All Access product, which had been officially released that day. One of the most interesting things about this product is that it is installation-free, or so Embarcadero claims. It uses a virtualized registry, etc., so that you can just start the application directly. I’m thinking that this might be useful even outside of the context of All Access. Especially for something like a build machine, where you might want to run it in various different configurations. Sort of like a "lite" VM. It will be interesting to see if Embarcadero uses this technology outside of All Access.

One thing I wonder about right now: Perhaps the biggest differentiator between Delphi Enterprise and Delphi Architect is that with Architect you get Embarcadero ER/Studio. So with the way the SKUs are differentiated right now, All Access is sort of an alternative to Architect. That’s how it seems to me, anyway. I suspect that we will see a different feature mix in Architect in the future.

David expressed a lot of relief at not being part of Borland anymore. He said that since Embarcadero is private, they can talk about upcoming features more freely than when they were part of a publicly held corporation.

David also talked about how Delphi developers who do database work could really benefit from the Embarcadero database tools. He wants to bring the integration much closer. For example, he wants you to be able to step into the Rapid SQL stored procedure debugger directly when debugging through a Delphi application which called a stored procedure in the database. Embarcadero has profilers for Java applications and for database servers; you can see the potential for interaction there, too.

We are looking for a good solution for doing heterogeneous, bidirectional replication between InterBase and SQL Server. We have a working solution already using a SQL Server job and linked servers, but I would prefer a solution that we do not have to develop and maintain. I am aware of CopyTiger, which claims to support both, but doesn’t really seem flexible enough to do what we need. There are a lot of replicators which doesn’t explicitly support InterBase, that support JDBC or ODBC connections, and they could possibly be a solution. David suggested that Embarcadero’s Change Manager product would be a potential solution for us, so we’re going to look into that.

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