>Jerry;
>
>You have sparked my interest in Kylix, so I went to the Borland web site - to look for seminars. Management said we should get out and see what is going on in the world, if it is available in the San Francisco Bay Area.
>
>Guess what? No Kylix seminars in my area - the nearest one is in Los Angeles. Glad to see that things have not changed at Borland - they are right up the hill from Silicon Valley, near Santa Cruz (the beach). When Borland bought dBase from Ashton Tate, we tried to get them to come to our users group meeting in San Jose. There was no interest on Borland’s part and they never responded to our requests. Finally, the dBase group "went away". Some guys think Microsoft does a bad job of marketing Visual FoxPro. Just look at Borland's history of marketing it's products!
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>As far as no seminars in the Bay Area, guess it is too close to Borland's home office and headquarters. It is more fun to be away at a remote location and all that. I just got through e-mailing Borland to see what there plans are for Kylix seminars in our area.
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>I will say this in Borland’s favor: They have a positive concern for professional relationships. Case in point: I did consulting work for Ashton Tate - just before Borland bought them. A few days after Borland acquired Ashton Tate, I received a very nice letter from Borland, asking if Ashton Tate paid me in full and if I had any problems or questions to contact them. Now, I like that very much and treasure it as I do a one cent check I received from Allied Electronics, for overpayment of an order. I like honesty and concern for relationships. Many companies could care less about such matters.
>
>Tom

I noticed that there were no seminars close to my home also. But, I had used Borland's products on prior projects and knew how to program in Pascal, which is important in evaluating a tool using that language. I googled several sites which had extensive examples with pics on how Kylix worked. I was especially keen in learning how to write cross platform apps... very easy - just use CLX components and a couple of compiler defs to give the compiler the option of using either WinXX API objects or Kylix Objects, when referencing the child objects.

I've visited the borland newsgroups setup for Kylix and there are a couple of nits I have with them. Their volunteer experts (having 'TeamB' in their address moniker) are, for the most part, very knowledgable on both platforms, and balanced too, showing no preference for either WinXX or Linux. But a couple of them are so anti-Linux that it makes one wonder if Borland knows how much business these 'helpers' are turning away.

Anyway, I made my second app with Kylix, a minor one like the first to be sure, but this one was exploring the db waters. I was able to create a form with two grids attached to different tables, with navigation and editing, updating, inserting, etc..., and didn't write a single line of code. Now, if I had used a new 'action' property instead of a 'standard action' property I would have had to supply my own code with the begin...end clause of the method. While Kylix is seamless to backends using its dBExpress technology, there is nothing like the commandline and datawindow that we are so used to. However, during the design phase, if one sets the 'Active' property to 'True' the data displays in the control live, allowing for adjustments of properties, etc...

Very nice tool. Since the server edition comes with seamless dBExpress drivers for Oracle it should make a very nice front end to the DB.
JLK