John,

>Since I haven't seen Kylix (accecpt at the shows) I'll take a wait and see. Thing that bothers me is the cross platform issues. I've asked many times how does one deal with printers, paths, etc. with Kylix?
>John

As long as you do everything with the cross-platform class libs that come with Kylix (both visual and non-visual), you won't have any problem. In other words, if you have a Delphi Windows app that doesn't do data access and doesn't use the Windows API, it will likely port directly to Linux with _no_ changes. Throw in data access and you will have to change your data objects to the new cross-platform ones, but from there the port would be fairly smooth as well. Any new development should yield functional apps in Linux and Windows.

It's bascially like any toolset...once you fully give in to using it, it will take care of the ugly bits. From the demos I saw, changing a Windows app that had a few screens and some fairly complex math was a direct port. Some unit names had to be changed because Linux unit names will be case-sensitive, but other than that it ported right over. I am generally the ultimate skeptic (especially when people tout cross-platform capabilities), but I was duly impressed. This was beta Kylix running on a Pentium 300 laptop with only 64 MB of RAM. It was snappy and pretty, and I don't recall it having a single crash...we banged on it for about an hour as a guy demoed porting an app and creating a simple database app in Linux.

Let's just say it is a tool that everyone will at least have to analyze, except of course for those who for some reason seem allergic to Pascal.

JoeK