CodeGear Announces Delphi 2007 and Delphi for PHP

ref: http://www.codegear.com/AboutUs/News/DelphiForWin32/tabid/240/Default.aspx

 

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CodeGear Ships New Delphi Tools
CodeGear, spun out of Borland, releases its first dev products: Delphi 2007 for Win32 and Delphi for PHP.

by Michael Desmond

 

April 2007

Newly formed developer tools company CodeGear has shipped its first new products since being spun out from Borland Software Corp. in November 2006. On Feb. 20, CodeGear announced the release of two products: Delphi 2007 for Win32 and Delphi for PHP.

Delphi 2007 for Win32 is the latest version of the well-regarded IDE for coding to native Win32 environments. The new version adds support for Windows Vista and AJAX Web development, and features a new visual component library (VCL) that provides for advanced Vista Aero glassing UI effects.

The tool also debuts CodeGear's DBX 4 database architecture, which provides a unified data access model for Win32 and .NET development.

Tailoring it for ISVs, systems integrators, VARs and small to midsize enterprises, CodeGear targets Delphi for Win32 for developers crafting performance-optimized code for demanding application environments.

"The Delphi 2007 announcement is very significant for our customer base," says CodeGear Vice President Michael Swindell. "We have for the past couple of years been putting a lot of attention on .NET. But 80 percent of our customer base is still telling us they want native code tools."

Swindell says this release shows that CodeGear is "still developer-focused."

One thing developers won't find in Delphi 2007 for Win32 is the Delphi Build module, which has been retired in favor of the ubiquitous MS Build subsystem. Swindell says Microsoft has made MS Build a platform standard and is "encouraging a third-party market around the utility. This gives our build environment a little more flexibility."

Delphi 2007 for Win32 comes in two versions: Professional ($899, $399 upgrade), and Enterprise ($1,999, upgrade $1,299), and offers backward compatibility with Developer Studio 2006 components.

Delphi for PHP is a component-based rapid application development (RAD) IDE that promises to boost the productivity of PHP Web developers. The IDE goes beyond basic editing and debugging, presenting a visual programming environment that supports component reuse and employs an integrated page template to decouple the GUI from Web logic.

Delphi for PHP offers extended database support, including integration with Microsoft SQL Server, InterBase, MySQL, Oracle and other databases. Also launched is the VCL for PHP, an open source visual component library tuned for PHP development and AJAX integration.

This release is just the company's first aimed at increasingly popular dynamic languages, says Swindell. "Expect to see Ruby products from CodeGear later on. We're strong believers in dynamic languages. We will come out with products this year."Delphi for PHP should be available this month at an introductory price of $249.

 

ref: http://reddevnews.com/news/devnews/article.aspx?editorialsid=205

 

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Taking a Look at CodeGear Turbo Delphi 2006

2/14/2007

By Peter Varhol

Most programmers of a certain age learned data structures in the Pascal language. Marveling at the power and simplicity of the language, you have probably never forgotten it. Okay, casting was hard, and pointer arithmetic impossible. But you learned that if you planned far enough ahead, then you never had to do these things. Um, except casting.

As a college professor developing simulation frameworks for students, I did some serious programming with Turbo Pascal for Windows. I moved to Visual Basic and Java as times changed, but I did my best work in Pascal.

When CodeGear, the new development tools subsidiary of Borland, offered me a preview of the new Turbo development tools, I jumped at the opportunity. While I also looked at Turbo C#, I spent the most time working with Turbo Delphi—a language that can be described as Pascal on steroids. However it is probably better described as a form of Visual Basic with a more functional and complete pointer-oriented language.

What Happened to Delphi?

Delphi was never completely phased out. But Borland was accepting its inevitable decline for a period of time. Now CodeGear—bless its developer heart—has decided to fight Delphi's decline with the return of the "Turbo" name, one that once signified an inexpensive, high-quality product with fast compilers.

Retaining its reputation as an inexpensive, high-quality product, Turbo is no longer turbo in performance. But it can still outclass Visual Studio in the speed of compile. Turbo is available as a free download (you'll be charged if you want it on CD), while the professional version is $500. The professional version lets you create new custom controls for the IDE and use a reports engine. The free version doesn't allow for these capabilities but you can still develop useful applications with it.

Getting Started

I hadn't used Delphi for ten years. My first surprise was the user interface. I had flashbacks to TogetherSoft and the Together IDE. A few years ago, Borland moved its non-Java tools toward the Together framework, giving them the Together look and feel. Today the layout is functional, if a bit old-fashioned in appearance.

The Delphi programmer essentials are included in its interface: the GUI builder, the controls, the property sheet, and the code-behind with Pascal procedure stubs. You can call the Win32 API, and because you have pointers, you don't have to call it in the unintuitive fashion of Visual Basic.

You'll quickly master Turbo Delphi if you've used IDEs in the last five years. And if you've programmed in Pascal in the last ten years, then you can become productive within a day. As a member of the latter group, it took me a day to build a sample application.

Delphi Pros and Cons

CodeGear added some modern touches to Turbo Delphi. You can build Web services easily and create HTML and XML documents. Anachronistically you can still build ActiveX controls, too.

Delphi is lacking a project type to create active Web pages. You have to use lower-level CGI scripts or a technology Borland calls IntraWeb to create them. IntraWeb seemed straightforward, but I didn't spend a lot of time exploring this feature. Instead of learning a new development model for Web applications, choose a different development environment with which you're already familiar. Or you can use Delphi for .NET, which offers the ability to build both .NET Winforms and ASP.NET applications.

Delphi for Win32 required installation of the .NET Framework, even though the environment did not seem to make use of it. The .NET Framework version is still at 1.1, so don't expect the most modern Framework features.

The documentation seemed to take a backseat. I was not impressed with the ability to navigate and find things in the online-only docs. Because the docs repeatedly referenced .NET access, I realized quickly that the same documentation serves both the Win32 and .NET versions. While Turbo is freely available, putting effort into building good documentation is part and parcel of product development.

If you want to use the software for longer than two weeks, then you have to register it. I have no problem registering; collecting user information is a big part of CodeGear's business model. But the product registration process hung twice on me, and while it didn't prevent use in the two-week period—and I was finally able to register—it seemed like an archaic mechanism with which to rebuild a developer community. You can also call in your registration, which is even more archaic.

You must understand pointers to have a true grasp on computer programming. While garbage collectors and finalizers are the lingua franca of modern programming and important to understand, it is not possible to grasp the concept of data structures without pointers. Turbo Delphi offers a good visual design environment and a language that gives you more power than Visual Basic.

Fighting against Turbo Delphi's decline is important. Not all programmers are going to rally around the bland, mass-produced Java or .NET languages. The principles that Niklaus Wirth expounded through Pascal are reasonable parameters on which to base a language for the ages. If it is no longer a modern, general-purpose language, then it is a useful language and IDE for building Windows applications. Delphi will even do services and Web applications in .NET or through its own mechanism.

The other alternatives, such as Turbo C++ and Turbo C#, are in the same vein, functional for many tasks but not as mainstream development tools. While you can't beat Visual Studio for its flexibility in developing many different kinds of applications, the simplicity behind the Turbo products has appeal to those who think tools have gotten too complicated.

Ultimately, Turbo Delphi may do little more than maintain the Delphi community. Accomplishing this goal is commendable enough. But Turbo Delphi may also be the answer for developers who are struggling with the complexities of .NET or Java, which are both larger and more complete languages and environments. There exists a class of less complex applications for which developers can be more productive with a product such as Turbo Delphi. The industry will cheer its reemergence if Turbo makes inroads for this kind of development.

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CodeGear™ Announces New Developer-focused Release of Award-winning JBuilder® 2007 Integrated Development Environment

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CodeGear Readies C++ and Ruby on Rails IDEs
by Kathleen Richards

As the company moves ahead, the plan is to refocus on core strengths, such as rapid application development (RAD) for native Windows applications and tools that enhance open source development.

"Microsoft has RAD for the .NET platform and one of our big differentiators is that we have RAD for native Windows," said Michael Swindell, CodeGear's vice president of products and strategy. "Our Delphi and C++ products are native RAD solutions, meaning they give you all of the rapid application development capabilities, database connectivity, components and visual development for native Windows."

CodeGear's new C++ Builder 2007 product will add support for Vista application programming interfaces and graphical user interfaces, such as the Aero interface. Developers can take existing C++ source code and recompile it as a Vista-enabled application. The upgrade also supports the DBX 4 database framework, the latest ANSI C++ standards and libraries (Boost and Dinkumware), and it offers better IDE performance, Swindell said. Pricing for the Professional Edition will be $899, and $399 for upgrades. The Enterprise Edition will cost $1,999, and $1,299 for upgrades.

Ruby on Rails IDE
Later this year, CodeGear is entering the Ruby tools space, joining the ranks of Sun, ActiveState and Microsoft. CodeGear's Ruby on Rails IDE, which is not yet named, is available now in beta. The product is targeted at enterprise developers working on Rails apps and supports Windows XP, Mac, or Linux platforms. The Rails IDE is the second product based on CodeGear's Eclipse-based platform (formerly code-named Peleton).

"Ruby on Rails provides a tremendous amount of productivity advantages for developers building applications with very minimal code, but those advantages come at a cost," Swindell said. "There is a lot of magic behind the scenes, so we tried to put that back in the tooling, so that it helps developers understand what is happening in their applications from a Rails-centric approach."

The new Rails platform offers key IDE functionality such as refactoring, code completion, type browsing and navigation, according to CodeGear. It also introduces a unique feature, called "Commanders," which is the ability to dynamically switch between typing on command lines and the IDE's tools, which are all integrated into the command line.

On the Move
The new releases follow months of uncertainty. Borland put DevCo, its tools division, on the block in February 2006. However, after eight months and no buyer, the company announced plans for a wholly owned subsidiary instead.

The distractions haven't affected the product release schedule. In December, CodeGear shipped JBuilder 2007 for Eclipse. February saw the rollout of Delphi 2007 for Win32, as well as Delphi for PHP, which was pitched as the first RAD IDE for PHP.

This spring, CodeGear announced a change in management. Jim Douglas replaced Ben Smith as chief executive in early April.

Despite all the activity, CodeGear must find a way to profit as a dev tools vendor in a market where free, low-cost and open source tooling present appealing options.

"Developers and corporations in particular, will pay for value received," said Jonathan Eunice, principal IT advisor at Illuminata, an IT consultancy in Nashua, New Hampshire. "So I read their corporate strategy and their product strategy as, 'just provide that extra something that you can't get from Eclipse or Visual Studio -- make it faster, make it more productive and make it more rapid.'"