Borland Software Corp.'s Delphi 6 is the first salvo for the minds and dollars of developers in the Web services war. That's the competition to prove that Web services amount to more than an empty catchphrase, that they can be instantiated in real code and working applications.

Delphi is Borland's most mature application development system, the product where most of the company's major technological innovations such as two-way tools and the super-fast native code compiler were first introduced. In this tradition, Delphi 6 is introducing new technology and tools that succeed admirably in integrating Web services into the general application development environment.

Although Borland is obviously much smaller than its Goliath competitors such as Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and Sun Microsystems, it has held its own over the years. Delphi has a loyal army of developers, acquired through fat and lean times. Borland at its best is second to none in programming technology, and Delphi 6 represents its best technology to date.

One major issue is straightforward: Is Delphi 6 a worthy upgrade and one that current Delphi users should embrace? Absolutely. Of general interest, and certainly of great importance to Borland: Does Delphi 6 offer enough to entice new developers? The competition is fierce - Java-based development systems (even Borland has one), C++ systems, Microsoft's new C#, and Visual Basic - and the arena of competition has been vastly expanded by the Internet. I'll chew on this question through the rest of the review.

Language and Component Library

Delphi is an application development system built on a programming language. The language is called ObjectPascal, a hybrid of Pascal and object-oriented programming (OOP). ObjectPascal is not difficult to learn, especially if you already know another OOP language. Borland's implementation of OOP has improved steadily over the years so that it is now a full-featured and stable object model. That model, anchored by the Visual Component Library (VCL), provides a well-designed and complete class hierarchy that is generally easy to use.

The library components are written in ObjectPascal and the source code is provided with the Professional and Enterprise Editions of Delphi 6. Each includes more than 300 components with support for both high- and low-level functions such as API support for Win32, Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), and Winsock. While a programmer may never tweak VCL code, it's important to be familiar with the library, and not just at the component property level.

The original VCL is a Windows-only set of components. Delphi 6 now includes an alternative component library, Component Library for Cross Platform. This expansion opens the gate to using the Borland Kylix bridge to Linux (Kylix is a Delphi-like development environment for Linux). Borland has long walked a fine line between Microsoft compatibility and going its own way - the source of some bad blood over the past decade. Delphi 6 goes forward in this vein by supporting standards such as XML, SOAP, and Web Services Description Language (WSDL) sometimes with and sometimes ahead of Microsoft's official position.

The RAD IDE

A premise behind Rapid Application Development (RAD) is that programmers should have development tools that allow coding at higher levels - preferably with components - so that they can cobble apps together as quickly as possible. Delphi has long called itself a RAD environment and has helped set the standards.

The major elements of the integrated development environment (IDE) - visual design surfaces, code editor, project manager, debugger, and class browser - are superbly crafted. The system is designed to let a programmer quickly add components to a design surface, edit properties, add binding code, and then compile to see the results. Borland makes the outright claim of having the world's fastest compiler for Windows and Intel processors. I believe it. Given that most programming is done through the compile, run, and debug cycle, this speed is not a pointless boast. The compiler generates native code for Intel systems, which produces EXE and DLL applications that run as quickly as those compiled from C++.

As familiar and comfortable as the Delphi IDE has become, I was glad to see that in Delphi 6 it has continued to improve. The reworked programming interface has something that many experienced programmers will appreciate - equal support for nonvisual programming (for example, methods and data manipulation) as well as visual programming (forms). Many development systems shoot all their flashy features at the user interface side of programming, when in fact a lot of programming is done with little or no user interface elements. Delphi 6 has tuned its wizards and editing features for nonvisible programming, such as the Data Module, which is a special variety of form to organize nonvisual code.