Delphi was released over 22 years ago in San Francisco. More than two decades later, the Delphi design philosophy remains steadfastly the same: continual innovation and increasing productivity for developers. Throughout its history, Delphi has been one of the most successful development platforms as it continues to navigate a highly competitive space, maintain its essence as a robust integrative toolset, and serve a large community of passionate developers. Deep investments have been made in the product over the years to migrate Delphi from a Windows-centric product to a multi-device development tool supporting the five most popular operating systems: Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and Linux.

Global Reach

Delphi developers can be found in virtually every corner of the world, and this is why a city moniker designates each of the 10.x versions to celebrate the diverse global reach and significant contributions that Delphi is making today. Since VCL has been the best object-oriented library Windows API wrapping for over 20 years, Seattle was chosen first (to honor the city near Microsoft headquarters). Next, the Berlin release acknowledged the strong developer community and partner network presence that Delphi has -- not only in Germany, but throughout all of Europe. Most recently, the Tokyo release recognizes the proud and growing community in Japan.

Tokyo Release: Running on Linux

Delphi has long had amazing support for multi-tier and server-side development on Windows. The 10.2 Tokyo release extends all of that support to the Linux operating system. This includes support for WebBroker, WebServices, DataSnap, and the new EMS modules for RAD Server. This means that many of your existing RAD Server/Windows server applications will migrate quite easily over to Linux. Only a few changes are necessary in a typical migration, thanks to the cross-platform FireDAC support. FireDAC works on both Windows and Linux to give you unparalleled access to your favorite databases. 

There's more. Gather up all of your Apache or IIS modules, your REST backend services, your Windows services, or any other server-side or console application, and easily migrate those app components from Windows to Linux.

New features continue to drive strong innovation

If you've not taken a close look lately, it's time to reacquaint yourself with the newer release of Delphi and explore some truly amazing features. These are only a few:

  • Live Preview - Let's say that you're designing an app, and you want to see how it looks on an iOS or Android device. As you work in the Form Designer, simply click a button to see your app in the Live Preview feature of Delphi -- in proper scale and clear definition. There's no need to plug in your device, and you can easily and repeatedly preview the app in either device format as you continue your development work.

  • App Tethering - Maybe you've built a desktop app, and you're also building a mobile companion app. How should these apps talk to each other? App tethering makes it very easy to connect any app on any platform to an app on any other platform -- including Mac-to-Windows, Android-to-Mac, iOS-to-Windows, and so on.

  • Parallel Programming Library - High-level, easy usable, and quick parallelization. It's the holy grail, and it's an integral part of Delphi.

  • Desktop Bridge - Need to get your desktop app into the Windows Store? Simply rebuild, since the Windows Store is available as a build target (just like any other target). No need to mess with the tedium that you may have heard about in other development platforms. We build easy-to-use, straightforward systems. And Delphi is flat-out easy.

Delphi Language Evolution -- Forever Young and Growing

The Delphi language is very powerful. Yet simple, expressive, and easily readable. Excellent for a student and yet solid and robust for the most adept professionals. It is a rich  language that is ready for the future, while retaining its solid roots of the past. The language has a long history, remains dynamic in the present, and we are certain of a brilliant future ahead. Delphi is a multi-faceted language, combining the power of object-oriented programming, advanced support for generic programming, and dynamic constructs-like attributes. And yet, for those who prefer it, full support remains for conventional procedural programming. Delphi is a tool for all trades -- with a variety of compilers and development tools that fully embrace the mobile era.

How broad is the range of the Delphi language? You name it. Desktop apps, client-server applications, massive web server modules, middleware, office automation, apps for the latest phones and tablets, industrial automation systems, and Internet virtual phone networks. These are some of the many real-world uses for Delphi.

The Delphi language, also known as Object Pascal, is a modern type-checked and object-oriented language, featuring single-inheritance and an object reference model (similar to Java and C#). Over the years, the language has grown to include records with methods, operator overloading for records, class data, nested types, sealed classes, final methods, and class helpers.

Beyond the classic OOP features, the Delphi language has gained support for generic data types and collections, anonymous methods (or closures), reflection, and attributes -- along with an extremely rich RTTI and component streaming support architecture. Part of modernizing the language was its transition towards Unicode strings as native types and the use of the ARC (Automatic Reference Counting) memory model on mobile platforms.

In terms of features, the Delphi language has no reason to envy to other more popular programming languages. Delphi is happy retaining its distinctive characteristics, its readability, and its flexibility through such a wide variety of the programming paradigms it supports.

Building a Future Together

Developers are absolutely essential to the future, in which technology will be ever more integral to everything we do. The success of Delphi is largely attributable to its community of passionate developers -- a community that cherishes the elegance and simplicity of the language, but also its ability to create powerful applications with ease and speed.

To learn more about the history of Delphi and today's landscape, read our 55-page booklet at http://online.flowpaper.com/79e6075d/Delphi22Magazine/. Enjoy.