Tag Archives: embarcadero

development, professional, software development, visual studio, windows

Cross-platform Windows and Mac lifts Delphi sales by 54%

2 Comments

Embarcadero has announced 54% growth in sales of Delphi and C++ Builder, its rapid application development tools, in 2011 vs 2010. These tools primarily target Windows, but in the 2011 XE2 edition also support Mac and iOS applications. XE2 also added a 64-bit compiler, making this the most significant Delphi release for years. The company says that the 2011 figures come on top of 15% year on year growth in the previous three years.

This is encouraging for Delphi developers, and well deserved in that Delphi still offers the most productive environment for native code development on Windows. The cross platform aspect is also interesting, though the FireMonkey framework which enables it is less mature than the old VCL, and there are many other options out there for cross-platform apps. FireMonkey does not yet support Android or other mobile platforms apart from Apple iOS.

2012 is also the year of Windows 8, raising the question of whether Delphi and C++ Builder will support the new Windows Runtime (WinRT) in future, and if it does, whether this will be FireMonkey only, or whether it could work with a XAML-defined user interface.

adobe, embarcadero, mobile, open source, professional, software development

PhoneGap likely to move to Apache Software Foundation

Nitobi’s Brian LeRoux, who works on PhoneGap, has announced the start of a process to move the project to the Apache Software Foundation:

We have initialized the process to contribute PhoneGap to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). The process is straightforward beginning w/ a submission of a proposal to the ASF that describes the move in detail. We’ve been looking at different options for a foundation contribution since the beginning. Now is the time. PhoneGap is hugely adopted and the IP belongs in an org aligned w/ our goals, philosophy and the web. It will remain free software, licensed as it always has been: Apache/BSD/MIT.

Apparently the name may change thanks to a trademark dispute.

PhoneGap seems to have plenty of momentum and is turning up in a variety of tools, including Adobe DreamWeaver and Embarcadero RAD PHP XE2, to mention two I am aware of.

delphi, embarcadero, professional, software development

Delphi and RAD Studio XE2 gets its first update as Embarcadero confesses copyright issue

Embarcadero has posted its first update for Delphi XE2 and C++Builder XE2. Whether this shows commendable responsiveness, or that that the original release was buggy and premature, is a matter for debate.

Either way, the list of fixed bugs is extensive. There is also a copyright issue, since Embarcadero says – note use of that mightily abused word “may”:

We were recently made aware that some code in the 3D support in FireMonkey may be similar to code in GLScene, an MPL open source project. We worked with Eric Grange, a key contributor to the GLScene project to remedy the issue and replace the code in question.

Unfortunately applying the patch means a full uninstall and reinstall, though Embarcardero says that future patches will be based on this new build which I presume means this surgery will not be required again.

apple, delphi, professional, software development, windows

Delphi team focusing on FireMonkey, VCL winding down?

3 Comments

Julian Bucknall at componnent vendor DevExpress writes a thoughtful post arguing that Embarcadero will focus on Delphi’s new cross-platform FireMonkey framework in future, and that the VCL (Visual Component Library) which has been at the heart of Delphi since its first release will receive little future investment.

Bucknall notes that ex-Borland employee Danny Thorpe tweeted about 1/3 of the Delphi VCL and IDE team being laid off in Scotts Valley, USA; while Embarcadero’s Tony De La Lama blogs about new posts in Europe. FireMonkey was originally developed in Russia.

The VCL is a mature framework by any standards (Delphi was first released in 1995), and now that the 64-bit VCL has been released the most pressing demands of developers have been met.

Further, Microsoft itself is slowing development of the Win32 API on which VCL is based, in favour of the mobile and touch-friendly Metro user interface and the new Windows Runtime on which it is built. The VCL will never adapt to Metro, but FireMonkey might do so. The Windows Runtime has an API which is represented by metadata in same format used by .NET’s Ildasm. If Embarcadero can adapt Delphi to read this metadata so that you can easily call the API, then a Delphi for Metro seems plausible, but it would not use the VCL.

Delphi already works well for Windows applications, so from Embarcadero’s point of view, growth will come from cross-platform and mobile development using FireMonkey.

The main snag is that unlike the VCL, FireMonkey is far from mature, and developers are complaining about lack of documentation as well as limitations in the current implementation.

There is also a philosophical difference between VCL and FireMonkey. VCL is a “heavyweight” GUI framework in that it depends on native Windows controls, with the advantage that you get a truly native look and feel in your Delphi application. FireMonkey is a “lightweight” GUI framework which renders the UI entirely through custom drawing, which is great for cross-platform consistency, but poor if you want a native look and feel. Performance-wise, and despite the name, heavyweight frameworks often feel faster because native controls are optimised for the operating system.

The key question then: will FireMonkey be as good for cross-platform, as the VCL has been for Windows? Based on my first experiments I am not sure at the moment, though I expect it to improve. I would be interested in views from others who have worked with it.

delphi, development, embarcadero, software development

Embarcadero RAD Studio XE2 will have cross-platform compilation

1 Comment

A Google search for RAD Studio XE2, presumably the successor to RAD Studio XE which includes Delphi, Delphi Prism (for .NET), C++ Builder and RAD PHP, throws up the following page:

image

The actual links need a login for a closed beta unfortunately.

Hmm, what caught my eye is the entry for cross-platform applications. Good to see this coming soon.

apple, delphi, embarcadero, linux, mobile, professional, software development

Embarcadero promises Delphi everywhere: Mac, iOS this year, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone to follow

5 Comments

I noticed the following remark from Embarcadero’s David Intersimone regarding Delphi, its application builder based on Pascal.

We are putting Delphi (and C++Builder) everywhere this year and over the next 5 years. Today you can use Delphi for Desktop, Client/Server, Multi-Tier, Cloud, Web, Web Services (REST and SOAP). This year you will also be able to build for Macintosh and iOS. Linux is also on the roadmap for the coming years along with Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone 7.

Welcome news; though Delphi enthusiasts are all too familiar with bold promises. Two years ago I interviewed Embarcadero’s CEO Wayne Williams and he promised cross-platform Delphi in 2010; but when Delphi XE appeared last year neither Mac nor 64-bit (another longstanding request) was included.

That said, I am still a big Delphi fan. Mobile is a particularly interesting prospect. I have tried numerous cross-platform mobile toolkits and they all have problems; on the other hand they are improving fast and in a couple of years things like Appcelerator’s Titanium and  Nitobi’s PhoneGap may be hard to catch.

Update: what will Delphi’s Android support look like? I would be interested to know whether Embarcadero is working on its own compiler, or whether it is partnering with RemObjects and that what Intersimone is referring to is Project Cooper:

“Cooper” is a new and exciting research project going on in the RemObjects Software Labs, to bring the Oxygene language to the Java and Android platforms. The original Oxygene for .NET set out to bring a modern and “next generation” Object Pascal to the .NET world; Project “Cooper” is taking this endeavor to the next level, expanding the reach of Oxygene to the second big managed platform.

In other words, Project Cooper will compile Delphi code to Java.

Note that Embarcadero officially adopted Oxygene and offers it as its own product called Prism. It seems plausible that the same will happen with Project Cooper. Since Windows Phone is a .NET platform, there is also potential for Oxygene/Prism to target Microsoft’s mobile platform:

Windows Phone 7 – Microsoft’s new Windows Phone 7 uses Silverlight for application development,  and did I mention Delphi Prism does Silverlight?

says Jim McKeeth at RemObjects.

What about Delphi on the Mac and on iOS? There is also a possible Oxygene/Prism route here, via MonoMac: Delphi to .NET/Mono to Mac. However, I suspect Delphi developers would be disappointed if this turned out to be Embarcadero’s approach to Mac and iOS support. Programmers choose Delphi because they like compilation to native code.

delphi, development, embarcadero, professional, software development, virtualization

Another Windows app store – but this time it is virtual. Embarcadero’s AppWave promises instant installs

Embarcadero has announced the AppWave Store, a forthcoming app store for Windows which uses application virtualization to avoid the hassles and risks of the usual Windows install process.

image

The idea is that purchasing apps for Windows will be as simple as installing an app on a mobile using the Apple app store or Android Market.

The underlying technology was developed to simplify deployment of Embarcadero’s tools. The All-Access subscription includes a tool box application that lets you run tools using “InstantOn”, which means no installation, just click and run. I have used this for a while now and it works well.

image

When you run an InstantOn tool for the first time, you are prompted to download:

image

There is of course a pause while the app downloads. This is not thin client technology where the app actually runs remotely. It is installed on your local machine, but isolated so there are no dependencies or conflicts.

image

Once downloaded, you just launch the application. No other setup, other than software agreement and registration prompt.

image

The download is cached, so you can launch next time without delay, and it works offline too. AppWave is a rebranded version of InstantOn, and is also available for internal deployment of Embarcadero tools.

The AppWave store takes this technology and applies to a store for the general public. Developers will pay $99 per year (though the fee is waived if you sign up now) and get AppWave Studio, which lets you convert software to run under AppWave. The conversion process is called “mastering” and only takes a few hours, according to the FAQ [pdf].

Windows XP, Vista and 7 are supported clients, availability will be worldwide at launch, and Embarcadero takes 30% of your sale price. No launch date has been announced.

I guess the first big issue is whether developers will feel that the 30% fee is good value bearing in mind that there are many other ways to sell and deploy software.

Second, there are other app stores out there or coming, not least Microsoft’s own which is likely to be part of Windows 8. Will AppWave compete effectively?

Third, does Embarcadero have what it takes to market AppWave and make a destination for Windows users looking for apps?

App virtualization is a neat trick though, and could save significant support costs as well as being appealing for customers. Deploying apps using runtimes like Silverlight or Adobe AIR can be equally seamless, but apps have to be written specifically for those runtimes, whereas AppWave works with apps written for the full Windows API.

It is surprising that Embarcadero is not also marketing the AppWave technology for developers for general purpose use. Possibly this is coming; or maybe the company will try to keep it as an exclusive benefit for the AppWave store. There are alternatives, including Microsoft App-V and VMWare ThinApp.

See also Marco Cantu’s post Understanding Embarcadero AppWave, which is what alerted me to the AppWave store.

database, delphi, embarcadero, software development

Using SQLite 3 with Unicode in Delphi

2 Comments

I’ve updated my SQLite3 Delphi wrapper for Unicode in Delphi 2009 and higher. Previous versions of the wrapper ducked the issue by using Ansi strings throughout.

image

I actually used Embarcadero Delphi XE for the development, but I would expect it to work in Delphi 2009 and higher, since it was in that version that Delphi first properly supported Unicode. Converting older Delphi projects is meant to be seamless, except in cases where you are using pointers or doing interop with native DLLs; of course this wrapper does both.

The SQLite 3 API expects either UTF8 or Unicode strings. To be more precise, some functions have Unicode versions indicated with a “16” suffix, and some do not, in which case they expect UTF8 if they accept string values. Although UTF8 strings support Unicode characters, most characters generally occupy a single byte just as in Ansi strings, so one of the things I discovered was that I could not simply rely on PChar, Delphi’s null-terminated string type, which from Delphi 2009 is a Unicode type with double-byte characters. Instead, for cases where the SQLite 3 API expects a UTF8 string, I have used PAnsiChar as before.

It is all somewhat confusing, and there are a few cases where Delphi does not do quite what you would expect. I recommend Marco Cantu’s paper Delphi and Unicode [pdf], one of the best resources I found. This article by Nick Hodges on Unicodifying your code is handy too.

Finally, in the example I keep an object in memory and it is easy to end up with code paths that do not free it. I love this feature of Delphi (since at least 2007) which informs you of your mistake when the application closes:

image

I have uploaded the code and you can find it linked here.

Update: My assumption that Delphi 2010 would work the same way as Delphi XE was incorrect. I have some code that reads a blob field containing a UTF8 string and returns it as a string. I read the stream into a byte array and then cast it to a UTF8String:

str := UTF8String(bytes);

where str is a UTF8string variable. This worked in Delphi XE, but in Delphi 2010 I got garbage. I have modified the code to use a TStringStream and now it works in both.

delphi, development, professional, software development

Delphi XE includes licenses for older versions back to Delphi 7

1 Comment

I’ve just picked up that Delphi XE, the latest RAD Windows development suite from Embarcadero, includes licenses for older versions going back to Delphi 7.

There’s an explanation and list of what’s on offer here. Delphi 7 was the last version to use the old fully native code IDE and is delightfully fast and lightweight by today’s standards. Delphi 2007 was the last version before big Unicode changes in Delphi 2009, which often broke code, so could be useful for older projects.

The FAQ includes a few points of interest. Embarcadero is dismissive of the old Delphi for .NET (before Prism) and will not supply it:

That is an old technology that was replaced by Delphi Prism and we don’t want to encourage use of that old product.

If you have purchased XE and want to take advantage of the offer, you must do so within 180 days.

delphi, embarcadero, software development

Delphi XE still not quite ready for Vista/Windows 7

6 Comments

I’ve successfully installed Embarcadero RAD Studio XE (including Delphi). I’m running Windows 7 64-bit. On first quitting RAD Studio (which is still called bds.exe – it stands for Borland Development Studio) I got this message:

image_thumb2

Fortunately I know exactly what this means. Read here for my earlier explanation. And if I go to the registry editor I can see these entries:

image_thumb4

I also still get the error:

Error executing ‘C:\ProgramData\{7DE921C9-42C8-4DA3-8A44-043C3349FD1D}\Setup.exe’: The requested operation requires elevation

In one sense the error is not important, and the dialog does not reappear. It is still an ugly dialog, and as you can see from my Registry Editor, not a new one. Maybe next time?