Eoin Prout

To mark its appointment as the Master reseller for CodeGear in Ireland, MicroMail hosted a free CodeGear workshop at Jurys Hotel in Cork last Tuesday (23/Oct/2007).
This is good news as my experience of MicroMail has always been positive.

Ireland usually gets lumped in with the UK by most companies, so being from Cork and having used Delphi for the last ten years it was great to have a workshop in my hometown.

The workshop was presented by two evangelists from CodeGear and they went through the latest batch of products on offer from CodeGear.
- RAD Studio 2007
- JGear Plug-ins for Eclipse 3.2
- Delphi for PHP
- 3rd Rail (Ruby on Rails)
- JBuilder 2007
- C++Builder 2007
- BlackFish SQL

I’m not a Ruby fan-boy but the 3rd Rail demo really wowed me,
I’ve never seen a functional web app which uses a database created so easily and quickly.
This could be a very successful product for CodeGear.

BlackFish SQL is the long awaited replacement for the BDE and I was impressed but I’m concerned that the licensing model CodeGear have chosen will prevent widespread take up.

I was able to raise my concerns over Unicode support in Delphi and was assured that it is on the road map and hopefully will be out sometime in 2008.

After the workshop an excellent buffet lunch was laid on and we had the chance to talk with the CodeGear people.
An interesting morning that for some reason passed completely under the IT@Cork radar ?