As 2024 comes to a close, I’d like to take a moment to reflect on some of our Embarcadero product releases in 2024, industry trends, and thank you, our customers, for your continued support of our products.
It’s been an exciting year for us, and we’re thrilled to have you with us on this journey.
Embarcadero – 2024 Releases Roundup
Back in April, we released the first update for RAD Studio version 12, RAD Studio 12.1 Athens. The RAD Studio 12.1 Athens release primarily focused on enhancing the new features introduced in RAD Studio 12, adding further refinements and addressing customer requests. In 12.1, we also completed the development of the new C++ Win64 Clang–based compiler and toolchain, which was initially released in 12.0.
12.1 also introduced support for Split Editor Views in the IDE. This feature allows you to use multiple editors side by side, above and below each other, or a mix, all in the same window. This includes dragging entire sets of tabs out to floating windows and back into the IDE. This has been a very popular feature among our customers.
David Millington published a great blog post on the Split Editor that I would recommend checking out.
Over the summer, we released Delphi 12 Community Edition and C++Builder 12 Community Edition, two full-featured, free versions of our renowned Delphi IDE and of our flagship C++Builder IDE. If you are not familiar with our Community Edition (CE) versions, they are designed to empower startups, students, and hobbyists to create robust and scalable Delphi applications across multiple platforms, including iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS or powerful C++ applications for Windows.
This fall, we released RAD Studio 12.2. The RAD Studio 12.2 Athens release builds on the features introduced in version 12 and 12.1, and offers our first AI integration in the IDE, a new template library for web development, significant feature enhancements to the new C++ Win64 Clang–based compiler and toolchain, new Delphi compilers built as 64-bit apps, and more.
You can learn more about key improvements to the Delphi Language Server Protocol (LSP) in 12.2, and the 64-bit version of the DelphiLSP engine, which eliminates memory limits and provides smoother performance for large projects, in Nuno Castro’s blog post.
We also introduced WebStencils, a server-side script-based integration and processing of HTML files, often called a template engine. Check out Marco’s blog post on how to get started.
If you’re a C++ developer, I also recommend checking out David Millington’s C++Builder 12.2 blog series on C++Builder tips and tricks.
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Developer Tools Trends – Artificial Intelligence
While 2024 showed the emergence of multiple trends in the developer space (we will cover more in a blog series in early 2025), none gained as much prominence or traction as Artificial Intelligence (AI). In 2024, AI emerged as a game-changer in the developer community, driving innovation, optimizing workflows, and boosting productivity.
Given its importance in the developer tools space, I wanted to take a moment to highlight AI support across several of Idera’s developer tools brands.
For Embarcadero, we introduced our new IDE integration for LLMs called Smart CodeInsight in the 12.2 release. With Smart CodeInsight, we provide an open architecture for AI plugins, offering ready-to-use support for three online solutions (OpenAI, Gemini by Google, and Claude by Anthropic) and one offline solution (Ollama). Learn more in Marco’s blog post at https://blogs.embarcadero.com/using-ai-llms-in-the-rad-studio-ide-with-smart-codeinsight/
RAD Studio 12.2 was our first entry in the AI space, and we’re actively working on expanding our AI support in future releases.
Looking beyond Embarcadero at other Idera developer tools companies, UltraEdit, the Swiss Army knife of text editors, just released its first AI support this month. The headline feature of the new UltraEdit 2024.2 release is a new Pieces for Developers AI plugin that brings an AI multi-LLM chatbot assistant to UltraEdit. Pieces for Developers is a third party service from Mesh Intelligent Technologies and acts as a workflow assistant, allowing natural language analysis and interactive AI assisted development. Pieces works directly in UltraEdit, and users can interact with it just as they would any LLM-powered AI chatbot. Learn more at: https://www.ultraedit.com/blog/pieces-for-developers-brings-ai-and-llms-to-ultraedit-what-it-means-for-you/
Last month, Yellowfin, an enterprise and embedded analytics platform that combines action based dashboards, automated analysis and data storytelling, released two new artificial intelligence (AI) enabled features: Ask Yellowfin and Code Assistant. Ask Yellowfin is an AI chatbot trained on Yellowfin documentation in order to provide helpful responses to questions about how to use the features of Yellowfin. Yellowfin Code Assistant is an AI chatbot trained on Yellowfin technical and API documentation in order to provide helpful responses to questions about how to use the Yellowfin API. It can generate code fragments in most languages that use the API.
FusionCharts, a powerful JavaScript charting library that enables developers to produce visualizations of their source data, released Ask FusionDev AI, a coding companion trained to answer questions about FusionCharts documentation.
Looking Ahead
We have a lot of great innovations planned for 2025. Up next is RAD Studio 12.3, which the Embarcadero team is hard at work on as we speak. If you’re current on Update Subscription, you will also be invited to participate in the 12.3 beta once it’s available.
Wishing you, our valued customers, a happy and prosperous 2025!
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