TECH BRIEF

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t’s finally here! I can finally talk about the newRAD Studio product. As the Product Manager forRAD Studio, Delphi, C++Builder and a couple ofothers, I know it is always hard during the lastcouple of months before you ship the newproduct—or it should be.

As many people who rely on tools to help get their jobsdone, as a developer you understand the excitement ofintroducing new features or functionality or distinctiveproductivity items that will help make you and yourcompany more successful. Think of what it is like for the Product Manager to see the awesome new featurescome together and know that a lot of individualdevelopers, small ISVs, enterprises, and new start-ups are going to get a leg up on the solutions they are creating with your products.

RAD Studio is really three major parts: the Delphi 2010,C++Builder 2010, and Delphi Prism products. Each ofthese products brings a different language to the Windowsplatform, but they all have the same common thread: theability to rapidly build great Windows applications. Thisincludes the entire Windows stable of OSs including theolder Windows 2000, the continuing support for XP andVista, and early support for Windows 7.

There are areas that are common between Delphi andC++Builder, and they usually focus on usability and speed. When thinking of 2010, the new usability featurethat I believe will get a lot of attention is IDE Insight. Thisfeature allows developers to hit a keystroke and a dialogwill appear. They can then start typing in the feature orfunction in the IDE they are looking for and a most-likelylist is displayed. Once the item is displayed and selected,the user can then execute the command and the IDE will either go to the location or do the command.

There are two great things about this one feature. The first is that it will help people be more productive byallowing them to find things faster, while at the same time help teach the developers the shortcuts inside theIDE. The second is that it is a learning feature that allowsdevelopers to add new features to the IDE and the IDEInsight will learn about those new features and add them to the list.

Another common area is speed, and over the past fewyears we have witnessed Delphi and C++Builder gettingfaster, with the optimizations over the last couple of

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THE FUTURE TODAYwith Embarcadero® RAD Studio 2010 by Mike Rozlog

releases being in the neighborhood of 5x faster. Thisspeed / optimization continues in 2010, with the editionof background compiling for both products. This willallow long-running compiles to be executed in thebackground while the developer can continue working;this will be noticed by all developers.

The VCL is also a common item between the twoenvironments and it has been the lifeblood of the product helping developers build great user frontends forthe Windows platform. Over the years, the VCL has beenupdated like it was in the 2009 release, where all types of things were added as we implemented Unicode—thingslike the Ribbon Controls that allow developers to buildMicrosoft Office look & feel applications without theconstraints of .NET and the Microsoft Office libraries.

In 2010, a major feature that has been added to the VCL is Gesturing / Touch support. This is a fundamental change to the VCL, not a bolt-on addition. This is aninterface into the heart of the VCL that allows for fullgesturing with either a mouse or a touch screen. TheGesturing engine is available in all supported Windowsversions: 2000, XP,Vista, and Windows 7. As an example of how integrated the new feature is, you can take theoriginal Fishfacts demo application that shipped withDelphi 1.0 and recompile it in 2010 and it will be totally gesture/touch enabled with no coding changes.The VCL understands around 30+ common gestures and the interface allows for unlimited creation of custom gestures.

RAD Studio has always been known for its ability tosupport database connectivity and with 2010, this is noexception. Of course we have updated support for thelatest from the commercial database vendors, but the real news is around Firebird support. Yes, that is right;we now have support in RAD Studio for the open sourceFirebird database. The integration supports both 1.5 and2.1.x of the database and works just like all the otherdatabases supported inside the RAD Studio products.

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TECH BRIEF

ABOUT THE AUTHORMike Rozlog is the Sr. Director of Delphi Solutions for Embarcadero Technologies. In this role, he is focused on ensuring the family ofDelphi developer products being created by Embarcadero meets the expectations of developers around the world. Much of his time isdedicated to discussing and explaining the technical and business aspects of Embarcadero’s products and services to analysts andother audiences worldwide. Mike was formerly with CodeGear, a developer tools group that was acquired by Embarcadero in 2008.Previously, he spent more than eight years working for Borland in a number of positions, including a primary role as Chief TechnicalArchitect. A reputed author, Mike has been published numerous times. His latest collaboration is Mastering JBuilder from John Wiley& Sons, Inc.

what is coming in the future. The great news is thatEmbarcadero is investing in RAD Studio because theybelieve, as I do, that Delphi, C++Builder, and Prismproducts offer a great value to developers and are putting key investments into place to take the productseven further in the future.

Also offering great value to developers is All-Access which allows all of Embarcadero’s products to beaccessible to the developer. This means if I’m writing some code and I have to connect to an unknowndatabase, I can start up ER/Studio and create a quickreverse-engineered ER-Diagram of that database andunderstand it, or if I need to write better SQL, I can kickoff Rapid SQL and se the SQL IDE to build it. All of the products are available to the developer when theyneed them.

One of the great features of All-Access is that it supportswhat we call IONs or “Instant On” capability. This allowsthe individual products to be loaded into a stand-aloneinstant virtual machine for the particular product, so in the above example in generating an E/R diagram, it wouldnot cause the developer to muddy up their environment(registry, HD space, etc) with an install; it would be loaded in the instant virtual machine, run and then shutdown. The only thing would be the local file store for the E/R diagram created. This is very cool technology and there are many more All-Access features worthy of a write-up.

So don’t forget that the new 2010 is out there! It has a lot of great features that can help you take your Windowsdevelopment to the next level. Whether you are focusedon native applications or exposing and using the .NETplatform, Embarcadero has you covered. Plus, if you needmore than one product like RAD Studio, don’t forget to check out the All-Access product to give you, thedeveloper, all the tools you need—at your fingertips.

Embarcadero News & Events:http://www.embarcadero.com/news/events.php

When you start to break down the specialized features,I always like to focus on the ones that I think will help the masses. With the Delphi 2010 release, that feature isdefinitely the DataSnap functionality. In 2009, DataSnapwas completely rewritten to remove the dependency ofCOM/DCOM and it introduced one of the fastest ways to build a multi-tier application. In 2010, we’ve added theability to host the server inside the IIS; we added supportfor HTTP/HTTPS accessibility and tunneling, and manyothers. The one feature that I’m most excited about is theimplementation of REST access for the server. This meansthat DataSnap servers can now participate in any openarchitecture. It can consume RESTful calls and it canexpose its own services as RESTful, which again will allow developers to expose new functionality to anyarchitecture from TCP/IP,Web Services, Cloud, and JEE.

In the C++ world, we added the new Class Browser.This allows for developers to quickly ascertain thestructure of the C++ and be able to manipulate it veryfast. This has been one of the most requested features forC++Builder and the great part is that our implementationhas spawned more ideas around how to expose even more information in the future.

So, that leads us to Delphi Prism, our complete solution for .NET. Delphi Prism isn’t standing still either, it is always staying current with the latest from Microsoft’s.NET platform and since the product is built on the VisualStudio Shell (VSS) it means our customers are alwayscurrent. In the latest release, the Prism environment hasadded Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) that takesObject Oriented Programming to the next level. Thismeans that Delphi Prism now has features that Microsoftdoesn’t, and it makes programming in .NET with Prismeven faster than before.

There are so many other features that I could write about,but I only have limited space. It is always exciting to talkabout new products; it is also exciting to think about

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