One of the great strengths of RAD Studio is how little you need to do to create incredible apps which can run on Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and Linux. The secret sauce to that is the component-based way of programming. These little gems of ready-made functionality which you can just drop on your project and use right away means you don’t need to write lots of code to, for example, show an incredible calendar, or grid full of results, powerful animation editing, a full word processor with syntax highlighting – in fact almost anything you can dream up. RAD Studio has it either built in already or available free from the lively open source community, or one of our great tech partners and third-party vendors as a paid offering. I’m not joking – pretty much anything you could ever want is either available completely for free or can be purchased for far less than it would cost you or your employer in development time to create from scratch.
Using ready-made components doesn’t just save you time by avoiding the need to write lots of code yourself; it also allows you to benefit from ‘safety in numbers’. If you pick a popular, well-used source for whatever components you need the chances are they have been used by hundreds, thousands, or maybe even tens of thousands of other developers. This means any little bugs and sub-optimal design quirks have been caught, fixed, or ironed out. If you write your own code from scratch it means it might be largely untried and you have a nasty little bug lurking until one of your customers trips over it.
What was the The Best of Third-party Components and Libraries webinar about?
The length of time RAD Studio has been around in one form or another, (Delphi for 29 years!), means there is a huge wealth of these ready-made components and libraries. So many, I couldn’t go through everything in one webinar. I will be following up with another webinar soon focusing on the really great open-source community projects such as Sping4D, The Jedi project, mORMot, and plenty of others. Some of these projects have been covered at length in other webinars. Others deserve more air-time in their own right – and some are quite technical in their nature – so they don’t really fit in with the current webinar series which are aimed at new developers and those who just want to get a ground-level refresh of some broad concepts. Because of this the webinar focuses on where to find a curated up to date list of free Delphi components as well as a super-fast overview of some of the more popular commercial libraries.
Where can I find the replay for The Best of Third-party Components and Libraries webinar?
Here is the replay for The Best of Third-party Components and Libraries webinar.
Where can I find the slides for The Best of Third-party Components and Libraries webinar?
Here are the slides for the replay for The Best of Third-party Components and Libraries webinar.
