CodeGear made a couple of announcements this week that have generated a excitement and some confusion.
Delphi 2007 for Win32, to be released in March, is the latest offering for Delphi developers. As a current BDS user my first thought was “This upgrade is not for me”. After all I do use the Delphi.NET and C# Builder personalities in additional to the Delphi Win32 personality. However, I don’t use the first two as often as the Delphi Win32 personality but regular enough to want a Studio 2007 upgrade. But after thinking about it more I decided this was the right move for CodeGear so I purchased the upgrade and started the support and maintenance subscription to boot.
Why do I feel this is the right move? Simple, I need to start moving towards Vista support for my native Windows applications. Do I want to wait until CodeGear has all three personalities ready to ship or do I want the one most important to me now that provides Vista support? Of course I want the one most important to my work now. So I upgraded to Delphi 2007 for Win32 and by enrolling in the annual support and maintenance subscription I will receive the other personality when they become available at no additional cost. And I will continue to receive the latest versions of the Studio products for as long as my subscription is remains active, which will save me money in the long run.
The other announce, which has me really excited, is Delphi for PHP. I did some PHP programming last year. I like PHP but have been slow to adopt it. Unfortunately I’m not as productive in PHP as I am with ASP.NET. Part of the reason is a lack of in depth knowledge of the language, but also the lack of a solid IDE with a visual designer. Delphi for PHP promises to change this. And from what I have read and seen Delphi for PHP has the potential to be real winner for CodeGear.
Here are some links for those interested in learning more about Delphi for PHP:
- Delphi for PHP Introduction (includes a flash demo)
- Delphi for PHP Quick Start
- David I on VCL for PHP
- Delphi for PHP Product Page
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