Marco Milani

Anyone who knows me very well noticed I have not written any post about Delphi.
Yes, It's a little bit strange even to me, because Delphi is one of my best topic in my technical chats.

I planned to write some structured delphi topics in future, in this topic I would only write a short text about the new Delphi release.

Some days ago, Codegear (now Embarcadero Technologies) announced the new version of Delphi (http://www.codegear.com/products/Delphi/win32). This version represents a deep cut to the past company uncertainty . Since CodeGear spun off delphi rised again its head and appear more mature and more reliable product then tipsily previous two or three versions... let me cite Delphi 8 as the worst treason from Borland.

Even if Delphi 2007 was a very good product, in this 2009 version there are some nice new features like:
* Unicode support
* new DataSnap technology
* generics and anonymous methods
* some new VCL components
* some IDE enhancement

I attended some events in which codegear presented these new features, despite these feature are quite interesting, in MHO this is far from a "cannot miss" release. Unicode is really specific to cross-culture applications,DataSnap and the new VCL components are just extensions of functionality already covered by 3rd party components and IDE is mainly the same as 2007 with some new enhancements.

Anyway I'm really happy to see this new Delphi 2009, mainly because this is the first version of Delphi published by Embarcadero Technologies, a company really focused on development tools. I'm thinking to Inprise, than Borland, DevCo, CodeGear.... what a confusion! And, mainly, how difficult was to understand the medium term vision!

With this version of Delphi, I can smell the fragrance of the great Delphi age again, like the time in which delphi developers wrote tons of hi quality and freeware components, in which RAD was really RAD and one could write Database driven applications in minutes, in which Delphi was a leader and not a follower in the innovation of development tools.

I love native compiled languages, I have a lot of concerns about intermediate languages like java and .NET, so I'm happy that Delphi will follow the business of the native win 32 compiled language.

I'm also fascinated by Embarcadero. I appreciated very much the new company vision: Development tools+Database tools=CodeGear+DatabaseGear.

I'm sure that happy days are coming for delphi developers.