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CodeGear Ships New Delphi Tools
CodeGear, spun out of Borland, releases its first dev products: Delphi 2007 for Win32 and Delphi for PHP.
Newly formed developer tools company CodeGear has shipped its first new products since being spun out from Borland Software Corp. in November 2006. On Feb. 20, CodeGear announced the release of two products: Delphi 2007 for Win32 and Delphi for PHP.
Delphi 2007 for Win32 is the latest version of the well-regarded IDE for coding to native Win32 environments. The new version adds support for Windows Vista and AJAX Web development, and features a new visual component library (VCL) that provides for advanced Vista Aero glassing UI effects.
The tool also debuts CodeGear's DBX 4 database architecture, which provides a unified data access model for Win32 and .NET development.
Tailoring it for ISVs, systems integrators, VARs and small to midsize enterprises, CodeGear targets Delphi for Win32 for developers crafting performance-optimized code for demanding application environments.
"The Delphi 2007 announcement is very significant for our customer base," says CodeGear Vice President Michael Swindell. "We have for the past couple of years been putting a lot of attention on .NET. But 80 percent of our customer base is still telling us they want native code tools."
Swindell says this release shows that CodeGear is "still developer-focused."
One thing developers won't find in Delphi 2007 for Win32 is the Delphi Build module, which has been retired in favor of the ubiquitous MS Build subsystem. Swindell says Microsoft has made MS Build a platform standard and is "encouraging a third-party market around the utility. This gives our build environment a little more flexibility."
Delphi 2007 for Win32 comes in two versions: Professional ($899, $399 upgrade), and Enterprise ($1,999, upgrade $1,299), and offers backward compatibility with Developer Studio 2006 components.
Delphi for PHP is a component-based rapid application development (RAD) IDE that promises to boost the productivity of PHP Web developers. The IDE goes beyond basic editing and debugging, presenting a visual programming environment that supports component reuse and employs an integrated page template to decouple the GUI from Web logic.
Delphi for PHP offers extended database support, including integration with Microsoft SQL Server, InterBase, MySQL, Oracle and other databases. Also launched is the VCL for PHP, an open source visual component library tuned for PHP development and AJAX integration.
This release is just the company's first aimed at increasingly popular dynamic languages, says Swindell. "Expect to see Ruby products from CodeGear later on. We're strong believers in dynamic languages. We will come out with products this year."
Delphi for PHP should be available this month at an introductory price of $249.
About the Author
Michael Desmond is an editor and writer for 1105 Media's Enterprise Computing Group.