CodeGear CEO eyes Ruby

Formed late last year, CodeGear currently is the developer tools arm of Borland Software but will become a separate company. Early last month, CodeGear announced the appointment of Jim Douglas as CEO. Douglas most recently was president and CEO of ReShape, an electronic design automation startup company. He also has worked at Tality, a spinoff of Cadence Design Systems.

InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill spoke with Douglas last week about CodeGear and its mission.

What are your goals as the CEO for CodeGear?

Douglas: One is we've got a long legacy of offering quality products more in the compiled code area. So my goals are to continue to expand that business but also really grow the business in some of the emerging areas around managed code and dynamic code. I think that there's going to be a lot of market opportunity there and we've got a great opportunity to compliment where we've been in the past with some of the emerging opportunities.

What opportunities are you seeing with managed code and could you give your definition?

I think from a language standpoint, languages like Java and ASP.Net with C# and VB [Visual Basic] falling under that, I would put in the managed code area. [Also, in the dynamic programming area, we are] looking at things like Ruby on Rails and PHP [Hypertext Preprocessor]. Where do I see opportunity? Distinctly different between the two spaces, I think in the managed code area you've got a dynamic going on in and around the Java world where a good analogy would be deregulation like you saw in the telcos years ago where you've got a green field for a lot of new suppliers coming into the market and offering a lot of new technology and adding a layer of complexity and confusing the market. And I think that's what's occurring in the Java world. The great news is there are a lot of nice new technologies. For example, [there are] a lot of nice light new Java frameworks available. The bad news is it really upped the level of complexity for developers. So I think we've got a lot of opportunity creating solutions that are going to now enable people really to leverage this plethora of new technologies, but leverage it in a productive sense. I think that's certainly one aspect of focus for the company. And then, more in the dynamic sense, I think you've got important trends like Ruby and specifically Ruby on Rails emerging where folks not only in the Java camp but outside the Java camp, really look at it as a potential growth area to really stem a lot of that complexity. We're looking at Ruby on Rails as the potential next great application development environment for enterprise applications.

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