It was a busy summer. There has been so much happening lately that it is difficult to decide where to start.
Earlier this year we launched the milestone RAD Studio 10.2 (aka Tokyo). This August we released Update 10.2.1 that provided a number of highly anticipated quality and feature updates. So, what happened with the BIG September release? As stated before, we are no longer looking for the next BIG release. We want to provide customers the functionality that they need when it is ready and continue to constantly evolve the product ALL the time. We did 10.2.1 in August, but this week you should be looking for the iOS 11 update. We want to make it easier to stay on the latest release and deliver value more often.
We do have more work to remove the re-installation requirement altogether, but that is not a small task with almost 70K files involved. The good news is that upgrades today are more seamless and our Product and R&D teams received a lot of acolytes for that. The Linux support is a huge milestone and there is a lot more in 10.2.1 for both mobile and Windows.
Our marketing published an awesome magazine to celebrate the progress made with Delphi over the last 22 years… I encouraged many of our developers to share this with their supervisors, who think that Delphi is a thing of the past, many were pleasantly surprised. We are running a nice promo for September that goes with the “22” theme, so check-out the site or speak with your partner. It is a great time to upgrade or expand.
The VCL framework continues to evolve. I think that with all the technologies out there, we sometimes forget how good it is, and it is only getting better. High DPI support and improved icons make your apps truly stand-out, and we have plenty of more awesome updates in the works. Lately, we’ve spoken a lot with C++ developers, as we try to increase the awareness for C++Builder. It is amazing how much Delphi developers take for granted. While there are OK visual frameworks that support C++, almost nothing comes close to VCL. I am really excited to continue to educate our C++ community on what we can deliver and of course continue to improve the C++ language support.
At the end of August, we released Enterprise Connectors. These make integration of applications built with RAD Studio to the most common enterprise applications, such as SAP, Salesforce, Facebook, and many more, very easy. They use a combination of FireDAC, REST, and CData technologies to make user adoption seamless. I think that these give an incredible competitive edge to our developer community, especially considering the speed of development. It is fast development indeed.
Just last week we launched the Embarcadero Academy! Making our products more easily accessible for education and making learning easier is a top priority. I feel that a dedicated education site together with a FREE Starter edition that is available for Education purposes are important steps in this direction. I benefit personally… My thirteen-year-old son is learning Delphi and the Academy is making it easy (and inexpensive)! Visit www.embarcaderoacademy.com and find out for yourself.
Most importantly, last month we acquired Sencha. This demonstrates again our broader commitment to Developer Tools. Sencha is the home of Ext JS, which is the premier Enterprise framework for JavaScript development. I am super excited for the Ext JS community. Today there are few independent IT organizations with our resources committed to developers. There are also a lot of immediate benefits for our existing Delphi and C++ developers. Over the years RAD Studio provided many Web development options, but none has had the robustness of our core VCL and FMX frameworks. As Web usage exploded, this has contributed for some in the decline of popularity for Delphi. The Ext JS framework is a match to VCL in terms of sophistication and scalability. There are already several good ways to bridge the technologies. As always, we have really smart partners in our technology ecosystems that have developed deeply integrated solutions (e.g. UniGui, Kitto). Developers can also use Ext JS through the REST API connectivity enabled by RAD Server. We will work with our technology partners to make the integration even more seamless.
The product team also just published a roadmap updated for September 2017. It includes plans for the upcoming 10.2.2 and 10.3 releases. There are also details on some research areas R&D is exploring. All of this as we continue our commitment to developers in keeping Delphi, C++Builder, and RAD Studio the premier choice for expert developers everywhere.
After a busy summer, we are all preparing for a busier fall. The community is full of ideas, Block Chains, more IoT support options, better TFS integration, and as always many ideas for language features. Our PMs are busy evaluating ideas and working with R&D on specs. We are open to technology partners and MVPs to participate and introduce products that expand our capabilities, Woll2Wall made an awesome Beacon Editor with FMX, the much anticipated FMX Linux Clients are out, there are cool FMX designer ideas, so much more to come. We’ll demonstrate a lot of these during CodeRage coming November 7th.
This is going to be a productive fall. Get on 10.2.1 and build some awesome apps!