Please Microsoft, buy Delphi

So, now Borland plans to sell its languages and IDE business. Since I first read about the news yesterday, I have talked quite a lot about it at my office.

I feel Microsoft is one of the few chances for Delphi to stay relevant. Even more, perhaps Delphi could flourish under Visual Studio, together with C#, VB, C++ and other languages Microsoft has in the works (Python and F#?). So I hope Microsoft will buy Borland's IDE business (everything but JBuilder I guess). Of course, I only want this to happen if this is what the employees want.

If Microsoft does not buy Delphi, my office mates are crossing their fingers. They don't want IBM to buy it (the company I work for used to be an Informix shop, and there is still a big number of Rational fans among us).

Visual Studio 2005 Award for Customer Excellence (aka The ACE Cube)

I received my cube at home on Friday. I plan to post pictures in the next days. Overall, a nice gift. My thanks go to Somasegar and whoever else decided I should have had the award.

IBM 100% Pure Open AJAX?

I heard about Open AJAX today for the first time while reading the Dr. Dobbs Journal. So, I don't know a lot about it. Only that I am interested in any tool that provides decent JavaScript debugging.

However, reading what they say about it, makes me think it is probably just a piece of "religion-ware":

Eclipse itself is open-source code, so IBM's donated software for running Ajax code is likely to be held as the standard environment in which the output from an Ajax tool must be able to run. If Open Ajax reaches that status, the industry will have a way of measuring departures from standard Ajax and guarding against the possibility of Ajax being implemented in a proprietary or Windows-specific way.

Microsoft has a set of interactive Web technologies, including Ajax, bundled together into what it calls Atlas. "They build it [Atlas] using their own extensions" rather than sticking to strictly Ajax conventions, says David Boloker, IBM's CTO of emerging technology.

By giving Ajax "a common tooling," or Eclipse test platform where different Ajax code can be tested in one runtime environment, IBM is offering a workbench where proprietary extensions will stick out as not working with other people's Ajax.

So, now I am pondering what gives IBM & co. the special gleam to arbitrate on a technology that is in constant flux, with a myriad of ideas and toolkits seeing the light each month, and also a technology that was created by Microsoft seven or eight years ago?

Of course the objective meassure will be how many will find Open AJAX useful and will use it. But I am still interested in knowing how many will buy into this idea that theirs is propper AJAX while Microsoft's is evil AJAX.

We will see... But, right now I don't even feel in the mood to link to them from here.