Embarcadero rallies on Windows and web with CodeGear

Microsoft not the only fruit

By Gavin Clarke • Get more from this author

Posted in Developer, 26th August 2008 20:58 GMT

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Embarcadero Technologies has updated its recently acquired CodeGear Rapid Application Development (RAD) suite and languages for Windows.

Delphi 2009 and C++Builder 2009 feature the first merging of previously separate development environments from CodeGear and Embarcadero, sharpening the focus on database development. The tools also expand the former CodeGear's Visual Component Library (VCL) of re-usable components for Windows XP, Vista and the web.

CodeGear's Delphi and C++ Builder Architect Editions come with Embarcadero's ER/Studio Developer Edition data modeling tool - although it's not clear how far integration goes or whether Embarcadero is capable of delivering more polished products than CodeGear could on its own.

CodeGear's dbExpress data-access layer has also been updated to provide built-in support for the high-performance, small-footprint Blackfish database along with the usual database suspects from Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and Sun Microsystems.

Also included is CodeGear's DataSnap architecture, for multi-tiered web-based applications.

The VCL components have been updated for building applications in Microsoft's Silverlight browser plug-in for media and - somewhat late - AJAX. Components have also been added for building a ribbon-style interface for Microsoft's Office, Portable Network Graphics (PNG) image format, and interfaces for Windows XP and Vista.

At the language level, Delphi features generics and anonymous methods. Embarcadero also claimed it's the first commercial integrated development environment (IDE) to support the planned new C++0X and Technical Report 1 (TR1) extensions to C++.

Delphi 2009 and C++Builder 2009 are available in three flavors: Professional, Enterprise, and Architect.

Separately, Mainsoft announced integration between the latest edition of Microsoft’s Visual Studio and its own cross-platform tools.

Mainsoft for Java Enterprise Edition 2.5 features Mainsoft’s cross compiler for C# and Visual Basic, allowing developers to write applications inside Visual Studio 2008 using ASP.NET 2.0, AJAX Extensions and AJAX Control Toolkit and then have them run as native Java bytecode on a standards-compliant EE application server. Version 2.5 features support for Visual Studio 2008, C# 3.0 and Visual Basic 9.0.

Version 5.2 of Mainsoft for Unix and Linux also embraces Visual Studio 2008, while expanding its existing support for 21-flavours of Unix and Linux. The suite now also caters to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 on x86, SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 on x86, HP-UX 11i version 2 and HP-UX 11i version 3 on HP’s Itanium-based Integrity servers, and HP-UX 11i v3 on HP 9000 servers running PA-RISC.®

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