Saturday, January 7, 2017

Help me to make Bold open source project!

About 4 years ago I started this petition https://www.change.org/p/embarcadero-technologies-release-the-intellectual-property-of-bold-for-delphi to make Bold open source. 
Right now there is 278 supporters.

What is Bold
It is an ORM framework founded by a Swedish company Boldsoft that later was bought by Borland around 2002. The idea with Bold is that the UML model is the core of an Bold application. It is in the model you store the logic classes and relations. This is then automatically translated to a SQL script to be applied to the database and class definitions. 

Bold do the translations of rows in database to objects in memory in both directions.

For example to read the name of a table called Person

myName := Person.Name;

To update the name:

person.Name := 'Bob';

So this is much more intuitive that writing SQL and less error prone.
It has also a lot more to offer like:

  • OCL that is a side effect free (readonly) query language invented by IBM.
  • Derived members to calculate links and values automatically when needed.
  • The algorithm can be implemented in OCL or in Delphi code.
  • As no direct SQL is used switch database is often painless. Bold framework use only basic SQL for DB communication.
  • GUI is automatically updated. Bold components that show values is automatically updated whenever value in database is changed. This is even true in a multiuser environment. One user can make a change, one second later all other clients is updated with new value. Bold do all the work behind with the service (OSS Object Synchronization Service).
  • For those that have bought Devexpress VCL components there is a separate repository that adapt the components for Bold. Result is a much modern look & feel and Bolds features.

More information about Bold in wikipedia or just ask me.

Latest official release of Bold was in Delphi 7 Architect.
There is also an unofficial version for D2006 (and D2007 as they are binary compatible).
But after this Borland, CodeGear and Embarcadero have been quiet about Bold.
And this left many customers behind that hope for updates. I think many developers left Delphi because of this. 

The future ?
But Bold has been actively developed for those that have the source. My company is an example of that. We have fixed both bugs, optimized it and add more features. We love the idea of Bold as open source. But Embarcadero owns the IP, so we must have their explicit permission before we publish anything. Bold has shown the strength in our case as it is been used in production since 2003.

I restarted the dialog with Embarcadero again about Bold as open source. 

What can you do ?
So what we want to know is this:

  1. What are the interests for Bold now ?
  2. So if Bold was opensource, compatible with Delphi Berlin and actively developed, what are the chances you upgrade to latest Delphi ? Would you buy several licenses ?
  3. Does it matters if Bold is true open source developed independently. Or is it better to have same state as VCL ? Then the source is maintained by Embarcadero and shipped with the Delphi installation.

Please answer if you have the slightest interests to use Bold in the future for your applications with all those amazing features I listed above.
You make no promises. We just want to investigate the interests.

Comments, questions is encouraged!