With the creation of the partially independent CodeGear business unit within
Borland and the subsequent sale of the business unit to Embarcadero Technologies,
Delphi has seen a significant increase in investment and is once again a
growing and vibrant product thanks to its new technical features and to a
developer community gaining in morale and affection, after a few years of slow
growth and terms of capabilities and dwindling passion.
Embarcadero is investing more in Delphi than Borland did over almost the
entire life of the product, and also improving the way it reaches out to the community.
Long considered a “cash cow” with little future ahead of it, the product
is now clearly at the center of Embarcadero's developer tools strategy, focused
on native cross-platform development (which is going to be the direction of
future versions of Delphi, according to the current product road map1).
Delphi 2010 is another very significant step in this direction, after the impressive
Delphi 2009 and a rather good Delphi 2007 release. From increased RTTI
support to a significantly improved IDE; from the opening up to new databases
(like Firebird) to the support of growing standards (like REST), Delphi 2010 is
much more than an incremental new version. Its extended support for the
Win32 platform, makes the latest Delphi the best tool, by far. for native devel-opment for Windows 7. By devoting more than a couple of hundred pages to
the new features of the product, this book is a testimony to the significant
extension this version of Delphi offers to developers.