What is Delphi known for?
Delphi is the name of the commercial Integrated Development
Environment (IDE) for RAD created by Borland (see www.borland.com).
Borland sold out Delphi and other RAD tools in the year 2008 to a
company called Embarcadero Technologies which is now focusing on
the newer versions of Delphi and other tools.
RAD stands for Rapid Application Development, meaning that
common develoment tasks, such as creating user interfaces, have
been made much easier. For instance, without RAD you would have to
specify XY coordinates for every button and screen element, RAD
allows you to drag and drop buttons onto screens using your mouse
similar to a Mr. Potato Head.
The programming language in Delphi was Object Pascal, which is
similar to the old "Structured" Pascal created by Niklaus Wirth in
1970. Though earlier their was a distinction made between Object
Pascal being used as the language of Delphi and Delphi being
considered as the IDE for the object pascal language but according
to the definition used in the help files in Delphi 7 versions
onwards we can see that infact Borland itself rebranded Delphi
itself as a language. So, Delphi now becomes a language with a
dedicated IDE available for it.
Delphi allows you to create Standard windows programs, ISAPI
applications (web applications), Web Services, NT Services, console
applications, DLL's, ActiveX controls, and COM objects.
The last version of the software "Delphi" was the Delphi 8 for
.NET. After this it become sold as a part of the Borland Developer
Studio (or simple BDS) in the versions 2005 and 2006, with the
ability to compile for other platforms. At this time, the language
stops to calls itself Object Pascal, but Delphi Language instead
due the Microsoft .NET Framework support.
There is also a limited-but-free version of the BDS 2006 called
Turbo Delphi. Its price is more attractive, but it does not have
all the features that your Big Brother has: the languages that it
supports aren't integrated, there are separated versions for each
language and they can't be installed at the same machine (there is
a protection to avoid this). There is another protection that
doesn't let you to install additional "features" (Components) in
the IDE, but this protection can be removed at a little charge.
The newest version of Delphi as of now is Delphi XE with its
launch in 2010 it provides various capabilities to the language.
However, there are still certain things missing with Delphi that
its competing cousins are having which are - 64 bit support for
application development, mobile phone application development and
cross platform development to name a few. Though Embarcadero
suggests that the Delphi compiler is going to undergo a complete
overhaul and restructuring in the coming up releases so people
might be seeing 64 bit support in Delphi in not much time. The 64
bit version is promised to be out in the first half of 2011.