TURBU Tech

I just attended the Delphi Live keynote address by several members of the Embarcadero team.  They used the term “RAD Studio XE launch” a few times, but it’s not available for sale just yet, and they didn’t announce a release date.  But the feeling was that it’ll be for sale very soon, within a week or two.  I saw a few people filming it, including Jim McKeeth, who put videos of a few sessions from last year up on his blog, so we’ll probably end up seeing it on Delphi.org soon enough.  But I’ll recount a few of the highlights here.

David I showed a fortune from a fortune cookie he got at a Chinese retaurant just last week.  “You will do well in the field of computer technology.”  With the release of the new Delphi just days away, let’s hope it turns out to be true.

Michael Swindell, one of the top executives at Embarcadero, gave some very interesting numbers.  Out of an estimated 16 million total programmers worldwide, 1.7 million are using Delphi.  More than 10%!  So you’re not alone, even when all the C# and Java people try to make you feel like you are.  I found this particularly interesting because last year, when I was on the phone with Emb. tech support for an installation hiccup with D2010, I was chatting with the rep and I asked him if he knew how many people were actually using Delphi.  He basically said that that was a trade secret of Embarcadero’s and he could lose his job if he told me that.  Looks like perspectives have changed somewhat, and for the better IMO.

Michael also mentioned that even with the economic downturn, Delphi’s grown pretty significantly last year, including the biggest increase in upgrades from D7 ever.  He attributed this specifically to their strong commitment to quality, which was the main reason behind the much-maligned OSX compiler schedule slip.  I don’t remember if it was him or Allen Bauer, who spoke a little later, but one of them said specifically that they have a working OSX compiler and OSX-ready VCL, that they could have shipped, but it wasn’t good enough to meet their quality standards so they held it back.  They’re really trying to avoid another Kylix or Delphi 8 style disaster, and they seem pretty sincere about it.

Probably the most exciting thing that Michael Swindell said was that they’re starting to aggressively market to schools again, “from universities down to middle schools,” trying to get Delphi into classrooms and into students’ hands, at the sort of prices that schools and students can afford, including some way (not many details on this) for students to use Delphi for free for educational purposes.  It’s good to hear some public recognition that new blood is very important to the heath of the Delphi community and that they’re working on targeting the low end of the market again.  Borland sent Delphi into a decline by being far too enterprise-oriented, and that attitude seems to have gotten inherited, and it’s good to see that they’re starting to really see past that now.

Tony de la Lama, the VP of R&D, mentioned that they’re putting a lot of emphasis within the company on actually doing new development in Delphi.  Before, a lot of it was built on other products and with other languages, but they’re moving towards using Delphi internally a lot more.

One complaint that I’ve heard raised several times since the launch of Delphi 2010 was about how DataSnap servers were crippled, or at least less useful than they could be, because there’s no built-in support for encryption.  That’s being remedied in XE, with a couple different encryption modes out of the box and a way to add other filters if necessary.

Also, I got an answer to a question that a lot of people have been asking about the XE previews.  I don’t know if they’ve answered this one before, but if they have I haven’t seen it yet.  A big part of the new functionality in XE will be bundled third-party software.  I asked at the end which products would be with which editions, and the answer was basically that all the new products they’ve been demoing would be in the Professional edition, except for FinalBuilder, which would be in Enterprise and above.

There was more, but those are the points that really stuck out to me.  Delphi XE may not be everything that everyone wanted or expected, but it looks like a pretty solid release and the team definitely has their heads on straight.  I think they’re really taking things in the right direction, much more so than in past years, and I’m (cautiously) optimistic about the future.  They presented a lot of really good plans.  We’ll see how they work out.