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Embarcadero RAD Studio 2009 is done

2 Comments

Embarcadero / CodeGear has released RAD Studio 2009, which includes Delphi 2009, C++ Builder 2009 and Delphi Prism. Note that Prism has its own IDE, which is actually the Visual Studio shell; this is the new take on Delphi for .NET that targets Mono as well as Microsoft .NET. You can also install Prism into an existing Visual Studio installation.

Looking at the UK prices, RAD Studio starts at £979.00, whereas Delphi starts at £549.00. Upgrades are much cheaper – less than half the price in some cases. The message seems to be: get RAD Studio if you think you might need more than one of these three products.

I’ve been asked whether the upgrade to Delphi 2009 is worth it. I have no idea, of course, since it depends what you need it for – though if you need Unicode I’d have thought it was worth it for that alone. I do think it is the best so far in the post-Delphi 7 series. Personally I prefer it to Delphi 7 as well; though check Mason Wheeler’s comments to a previous post for a contrary view. Vista compatibility is another advantage, though you can hack this in any version of Delphi. I doubt that Windows 7 will be much problem here; it is close to enough to Vista that the same stuff should work fine.

2 thoughts on “Embarcadero RAD Studio 2009 is done”

  1. Do you remember Kylix? I thought it was a great idea… Today it looks like Mono is providing a chance of cross platform development for Windows, OS X and Linux.

    Gary

  2. Yep I remember Kylix, I bought it and it wasnt a bad product. I think the problem was Borland went to the market and said “Who want’s Delphi for Linux?” and everyone went “Hell, yeah that would be cool” so they built and came to sell it and found the enthusisasm wasnt as great. As a commercial Delphi developer there wasn’t any commercial leverage to be gained by selling Kylix apps which is something, despite all the M$ bashing remains true today.

    Personally I think for cross platform development we will see a continued rise in Javascript frameworks which offer true cross platform runtime, UI functionality approaching that of Win32 apps and no proprietry technology like Java or Flash.

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