CodeGear: dynamic language strategy Nov 18, 2006 00:23
Ben Smith, the new CEO of CodeGear has stated the following here: "We're also working on plans that can help developers take advantage of growing and emerging areas like web services, Ruby, Python and Ajax."
I'll only talk about the dynamic language portion in this blog entry. The Web Services/AJAX stuff is a different realm.
In theory, I think that dynamic languages are a good area for CodeGear to go after. The problem is that they are way late to the party and they face competition from open source movements and some pretty well established companies in that space. There is a good deal of momentum for open source Eclipse-based plugins to support these technologies: PyDev, PHP Eclipse and RadRails.
The two companies with the most "street cred" in this area are ActiveState and Zend. ActiveState is polishing up their 4th release of Komodo, an IDE written in Python based on the Mozilla framework. Komodo is a solid IDE offering for scripting languages. Komodo runs on Windows, Linux, Solaris and OSX; it's available for $295. That buys you a license that you can use on all platforms. ActiveState is a well respected company that does a lot of good things for dynamic language community. Interestingly enough, it was recently spun-off from it's parent company Sophos; and no, it's not a subsidiary.
Zend is a well known provider of PHP tools. They've got a pretty big following, hold their own Zend convention, have worked with a bunch of vendors to improve/integrate PHP and are currently working with Microsoft to improve PHP on windows. As their tagline goes, they are "the php company". Their Zend Studio Professional edition sells for $299; and version 5.5 of their product is in beta.
These are the biggest commercial pure-play competitors in the space for scripting/dynamic languages.
Examining the dynamic language market that CodeGear will probably pursue is the hybrid one where VS.NET competes as well. This is because I presume they'll roll in dynamic language support into BDS. But first, let's look at what MS is up to.
MS hired Jim Hugunin a while ago to leverage his work with IronPython. IronPython is essentially Python on .NET. Jim's the same guy that was behind Jython, so he's got a bit of experience bringing Python to VMs. Anyway, the point is that IronPython was recently released and I suspect we'll see some VS.NET integration in the near future.
Another thing that MS has done is to hire John Lam. John's recently been working on a project called Ruby CLR. It's a different project than IronPython; RubyCLR is a bridge that allows Ruby to use the CLR. With RubyCLR, Ruby itself doesn't run on top of .NET (there's another project for that (:smile:)). Supposedly he'll be working on dynamic languages in .NET, you can read about it here. FWIW, John's actually known within the Delphi community for his writings, notably some chapters in Marco Cantu's ===Delphi Developer's Handbook===.
So beyond what MS is doing, there are guys like Huw Collingbourne and Dermot Hogan hacking away on Ruby In Steel. Ruby In Steel is a VS.NET plug in for Ruby development. It's scheduled to be released in January and I'm quite intrigued by it. As you can see, VS.NET is going to have good support for dynamic languages shortly. Huw is another known name in the Delphi community for his writings. See a trend with Delphi guys and Ruby? (:biggrin:)
Then for PHP developers, there is VS.PHP. I've only dabbled with PHP, so I have no idea how good this is, I just did a google search and found it. The point is that here is a plug-in for VS.NET that supports PHP. It's available for $99.
So VS.NET has and will have pretty broad internal and third party support for dynamic languages. MS seem to be quite interested and committed to doing things in this space. They've hired some good people and they have third party vendors aligning themselves with VS.NET.
So where does this leave CodeGear? Well, like I said before, I suspect that CodeGear will try to build dynamic language support into BDS. If this is true, this is going to be a tough nut to crack. If not, it's still a tough nut, but a different one than I'm going to talk about here. :)
On one end, Eclipse and its plug-ins are free. It's hard to compete with free for those looking for inexpensive tools that provide a basic level of functionality. For pure play focus tools, Komodo and Zend have a huge headstart and an existing customer base. They are both well regarded in their fields of expertise and their IDE's also run on multiple platforms. Very hard to compete against them especially at their price point.
Since BDS only runs on Windows, it's most likely competition will be, yet again, VS.NET. This is because they both target Windows developers looking to use Dynamic languages. Here's where things get challenging.
Visual Studio is easy to obtain, I was given two copies of VS.NET 2005 Standard this past year for free. One from watching a few webinars, the other at MS' Visual Studio launch event. I'm not sure how much "Ruby In Steel" is going to cost, but I would guess we're looking at a price point lower than Komodo or Zend. VS.PHP goes for $99, $149 if you don't have VS.NET.
This means that CodeGear has to compete in the sub $300 range and offer something that these Visual Studio plug-ins don't or offer something better. MS is also pushing dynamic languages within the context of .NET. I seriously doubt CodeGear will be able to match that effort considering their trouble supporting .NET with Delphi. All in all, it's not impossible for CodeGear to produce a compelling product supporting dynamic languages, but from my point of view it's going to be a very, very tough thing to do.
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