While I was reading an interview with DavidI and Rob Cheng about the DevCo, I stumbled accross Rob mentioning Scrum in the context of agile software development. Scrum seems to be promising in making sure that the right product is built a little bit in the Japanese just-in-time style. It is a project management methodology, so it needs a softare development methodology and there it is most times accompained by eXtreme Programming (XP).

Read an introduction about it in Wikipedia.

Borland did have a BTP confcall a few days ago. They have a transcript of the chat and the recorded conference call on line for public access. They also have a roadmap for Delphi that includes two additional releases beyond Delphi 2006.

In a nutshell: the show is (supposed to be) going on. My take: we had these rumours Borland going out of business for over ten years. Now they seem to really try to get rid of the tools that made them the company we recognize. The complete development team is going into the new company (“DevCo”) too. This may play out well for the tools and for the customers in the end, since the new company can focus again on innovating in the area they are at home.

They don’t have an investor yet, though…

Due to no coincidence I became aware of another blog just arond the globe that seems to be devoted to Web 2.0 and fond of Morfik too. Mauricio Longo’s New IT Trends already discussed some very current topics and his style (being a technical writer) is very good. Wholeheartedly recommended.

Yeah, here we are again! Another blockbuster mega game frachise :). Seriously: In the weekend I had too much free time (kidding) and put together another tiny game, a Pong-like something that I loved to play in the early ‘80es. I was thinking for a long time to write it and now it just seemed appropriate to see whether such an interactive game can be done in Morfik without Flash or SVG. So this is completely HTML/JavaScript, even no images are used — a good demonstration of Morfik’s JST technology. I did some fading effects too in the title bar to spice it up a bit.

Again, it will land in the Morfik Pioneers Lab (full source) and will get it up running here too.

Since we are interested in Morfik (who guessed?) we are also fond of all things AJAX. So Yahoo’s release of the Yahoo! User Interface Library and Design Pattern Library are of course important. The Design Patterns Library is an interesting and welcome take on web usability and UI capabilities standardization. The UI Library is BSD licensed (free for all uses) so I am looking for ways incorporating its controls into Morfik.

David I of Borland fame has this to say about the spinoff. Very optimistic. (Did I mention I have a Delphi 4 Enterprise CD signed by him and Charlie Calvert?:)

The question is who the buyer will be. It may be a competitor (there are not too many left) that will simply sink the tools and grab the customer base. Or it may be someone who keeps things up and running to milk the cow (not too likely, does not make much business sense). Or in the best case a company that continues in the best tradition of Borland to innovate and to excell.

This is completely insane. Delphi is the best development tool for Windows ever. I am not biased at all. (Did I mention that I wrote a great deal of an award-wining interactive electrical circuit editing/analysis application in Delphi among other things?) AFAIS they are spinning off all the IDE products and keeping the ALM business. Good.
On the other hand this might open some opportunities for Morfik. I suggested to Fuad to buy the stuff outright, but he said “Not yet”. Anyway what possible advantages do you see cooking there for Morfik?

Just before I forget about this: @Sweeper is a clone of the well-known Microsoft(R) Windows(R) Mine Sweeper application. My primary goal was to collect first-hand experience with and explore some abilities of Morfik and to share this knowledge with fellow developers (and have some fun:).

It took me almost a week (of hobby time:) to put this together since I had to figure out a lot of Morfikism on the way.

You can download the latest version from the Morfik Pioneers Lab. As soon as I will be able to get it hosted I will get it up somewhere here too.

James Smith writes:

“An additional point is that the right no-cache settings have to be identified for each browser (IE, Moz, Opera), so sensitive rendered data is not leaked through the browser cache to your local drive. Another issue I’d like to be fully versed on.”

I have to totally agree. One interesting question is how AJAX affects the picture. Do those asychronous requests get cached as well?

Was thinking about starting my blog for a while. Finally it happened due to the need of sharing some thoughts on Morfik with the community. I also plan to include all types of other thoughts about technology.