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Text CodeGear, the development tools arm of Borland Software Corp., is slated to announce a partnership with MySQL AB to deliver software solutions to enable developers to experience more flexibility and quickly develop database-driven Web applications.
The companies are expected to publicly announce the partnership at the MySQL conference in Santa Clara, Calif., on April 24. Officials at CodeGear and MySQL said the companies have collaborated on integrating the MySQL open-source database with CodeGears Delphi IDE (integrated development environment) product line, including the new Delphi for PHP and Delphi 2007 for Win32 products, as well as Delphi for .Net.
“The genesis of this is weve been seeing the increase of adoption of MySQL with our tools,” said Michael Swindell, CodeGears vice president of products and strategy. “Delphi and C++Builder are primarily used for building database-oriented applications.”
Indeed, Swindell said in 2002 only 20 percent of the users of the CodeGear tools (then known as Borland) had MySQL integrations, but in 2006 more than 50 percent of CodeGears customers had MySQL connections.
Swindell said Delphi for PHP is the first IDE to bring RAD (rapid application development) productivity and a reusable, visual component-based approach to PHP Web development.
“Delphi for PHP is very significant because MySQL is part of the LAMP [Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python],” Swindell said.
Meanwhile, in a statement, Swindell said: “Weve partnered with MySQL to make it seamless and affordable to rapidly develop powerful, database-driven Web applications for both Windows and PHP with visual component-based RAD tools like Delphi. Our goal is to give developers choice and flexibility in building rich, high-performing applications. Our partnering and integrated products will make it easier for developers to build and deploy with MySQL, which has become one of the most widely used databases for applications development.”
“I think what theyre doing with Delphi for PHP is very cool,” said Zack Urlocker, MySQL ABs executive vice president of products. “The Web desperately needs this type of high-productivity development environment and especially having easy native integration with MySQL.”
Moreover, Urlocker, who spent some time at Borland, said: “Delphi is one of the most important rapid application development tools for Windows and to bring that level of productivity to Web developers is a great thing. Web development tools today are still primitive compared to what people are used to for Windows development. So this is a huge productivity boost.”
Moreover, said Urlocker, “I think it will open up a significant audience of Delphi developers to PHP and PHP developers to higher productivity. MySQL gets deployed in the majority of PHP applications, so it also helps expand our market. This gives developers more choices, which is always a good thing.”
Swindell bottom-lined the issue. “The core of it is if you have developers building rich GUI [graphical user interface] applications that are database driven, this gives them a first-class, open-source option.”