Yesterday in Milan I attended (and was part of) a CodeGear presentation, the first of a European tour (along with Rotterdam, I was told). Jason Vokes introduced the status of CodeGear, which claims to be "World Largest Indepentent Developer Tools Provider". The company, according to Jason, has financial strength, a growing community, and global operations. CodeGear aims to cover a broad spectrum of development tools, languages, platforms. He also underlines the speed of product delivery in 2007: truly there have been many releases on the Delphi and Java sides, plus the entry into two new languages, PHP and (soon) Ruby.

The second speaker was Pawel Glowacki, who introduced the soon-to-be-released Ruby on Rails IDE, called 3rdRail. It is one of the first few RAD IDEs for Ruby on Rails, with the aims of (quoting Pawel):
- accelerate development
- increase productivity of expert developers
- help new programmers learn
- merge best command-line and IDE features
Pawel showed a very interesting preview of 3rdRail, which is an IDE based on Eclipse. I hope to have some free time to play with it ASAP.

I was the third speaker and introduced RAD Studio 2007 to the audience, focusing on the new .NET features (ASP.NET in particular) and also on the BlackFish SQL, which is also available to the Delphi Win32 personality. There is also an enhanced Data Explorer for dbExpress with a nice Query Builder I haven't seen referenced on the web. It is a small but useful addition to the Delphi for Win32 personality in RAD Studio 2007. Differently from Jason and Pawel, I'm speaking only at the Milan event, and won't be joining the rest of the tour.