BCB for short
BCB is a Program Developer Environment for mostly RAD (Rapide Application Development). The current release is BCB 5.
Borland was famous for their compilers. Starting with Tubo Pascal Borland set a standard for compilers. Turbo C++, Borland C++, Borland C++ Builder, Delphi followed and enhanced that standard.
The history of Borland has not been straight forward. When economic problems arose many counted Borland out. In order to gain other marketshares which was more profitable, Borland tried to change market scope. Enterprise size companies with own software development or larger software companies was the new market. Borland changed name to Inprise to mark the change.
This could have been a fatal misstake. The market which Inprise was aiming for had already confident players. For example Oracle and Progress. Both of them with an environment that relies on their own database. And on top of that their own 4GL programming language. The networkning in these programming langues is hidden to the programmer, so he or she has only to focus on implementing the user interface and buisness logic. Inprise on the other hand did not promote their database (Interbase) and talked a lot of networknig through CORBA. Using CORBA was new and untested by the market. Actualy the new Inprise was new and untest. Who would take the risk to use a new company implementing new technology which did not promote their own database?
Borland has always had enthusiastic users, which now felt that Borland had left them. Promises from the new Inprise that this was not the case did not felt comfortable. With users telling that they would stop using the Borland compilers and the new market which did not know Inprise at all, the future did not look bright. At this time Inprise changed CEO. The new CEO had worked for the company when it was called Borland and was still famous. He knew the users and listend to them. Inprise started a new branch, Borland.com which became responsible for development tools. The (now) old Inprise kept focus on enterprise customers. Borland kept listening to their users. The users wanted more stable products. So the release of BCB 5 was delayed. During the delay Borland tested and corrected the product and when the release came it was an instant success.
Another thing the users told Borland was that they liked the operating system Linux. Therefore Borland started to develop Linux version of their development tools. Another company supporting was (is) Corel. But Corel did not have development tools. This was solved by merging Corel with Borland/Inprise
Borland C++ Builder uses the same VCL as Borland's Delphi and is written in Object Pascal. The first incarnation of BCB was Borland C++ Builder 1. The succesor was BCB 3, which was followed by BCB 4 and BCB 5.
Borland C++ contained OWL, a full object oriented framework written in C++. In BCB OWL is removed in favour of VCL. This means that Borland uses the same framework in both Delphi and in BCB. This is good for Borland; they can spend more time in maintaining the framework than they could if they kept OWL. But for the BCB programmer this can be a burden. To fully understand VCL the programmer has to know about an other language - Object Pascal.
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