Historically CodeCentral has served two primary use cases: our official registered user download portal, and a community repository of code, samples and resources. A lot has changed since CodeCental launched. When CodeCentral was launched in 1999 (during the Inprise era) right before Delphi 5 was released, there weren’t many options for a central community file hub like this. Today, twenty years later, a lot has changed.
In 1999 Google was just 3 years old. Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace did not exist yet. You can view CodeCentral from December 2000 on the Wayback Machine (this is after the return to the Borland name). There were 6088 items in CodeCentral back in 2000. Just over half of them 3600, were for Turbo Pascal.
Today GitHub, BitBucket and others provide free version controlled source code repositories, while Dropbox, Google Drive, and others provide a convenient way to share other types of files. Not to mention the prevalence of low cost web hosting. The need to have a centralized community file repository is less necessary. So where does that leave CodeCentral?
As of this blog post CodeCentral contains 30,888 items, with 3603 of them for Turbo Pascal (yes, we got 3 new ones since 2000). Beyond items, many new products were added, and retired. Just for fun, I checked out CodeCentral Item 2, (Item 1 doesn’t exist) and it was originally uploaded on Fri, 09 Jul 1999 00:00:00 GMT by Mike Orriss (with RemObjects Software). It is a TActionList example for Delphi. It was downloaded 1766 times since then, with the last download at 2018-02-03T13:10:26-08:00. Well at least it was until someone goes to check out Mike’s work.
CodeCentral is a part of the legacy Embarcadero Developer Network infrastructure inherited from Borland. Slowly we’ve been evolving and migrating away from this infrastructure. A few years back we notified Tech Partners that we were planning to end of life CodeCentral at some point, and that they should look for other channels to distribute their components, libraries, etc. (and we will notify them again).
Within Embarcadero, we’ve been moving our samples and other code downloads to GitHub. This has the advantage that you can browse the code, submit pull requests for changes, and see the history of the files and projects.
The registered user downloads will be moving to a new customer portal, and we will be moving some of the more popular community items from CodeCentral in the near future. Shortly thereafter CodeCentel will be shut down completely. If you have code, libraries or samples on there that you want to maintain, then you will need to find a new home for them soon.
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Just migrated all my old blog posts to a new engine and identified many broken links in the format of http://cc.codegear.com/xxxx that were many years old. 😂 While searching for the new link to CodeCentral, no wonder I landed here.
It was a lot of fun publishing my open source Delphi plugin at CodeCentral as university student back in 2005-2007 when I read through the old posts. Thanks for all the great memories and wish everything goes great at Embarcadero.