About time too. Borland chose Comdex to sneak out the news that the Inprise moniker was finally being cast overboard. We imagine that the relief expressed down at Scotts Valley will have been enough to generate a small thermal discernable from Las Vegas.

We caught up with Mike Swindell, director of product management for the division that includes C++ Builder Delphi and Kylix, at a KDE event. 2.0

For now these will be home-rolled wrappers, but the idea is to map the VCL objects - themselves wrappers for the idiocies of the vanilla C Windows APIs - to CLX objects. Kylix will have three families - classes for base UI apps, for web server apps and for a high performance DB library (DB Express) the latter shipping with reference drivers for MySQL Interbase and others.

As for KDE support, it'll start sincere but simple. Kylix will produce KDE-compliant apps, which respond to KDE theme changes for example. Later on, it will be extended to support features such as drag and drop, and importing and exporting classes. KDE already has a pretty slick IDE of its own, but if Borland delivers, its Linux Delphi could persuade its many Windows devlopers to suck it and see. ®