So like a lot of people out there, I’ve been anxiously waiting for the next Embarcadero RAD Studio. Many will agree that since the 2009 release, the product has made great leaps forward. There’s been a lot of secrecy around the newest version 2011 though. The main component of the product, Delphi was codenamed Fulcrum and a few but barely any details were leaked about the project, however, the intention was to include cross-compiling support for Mac OSX and Linux in this release. I personally would have preferred they had gone for x64 support first, but I suppose cross-platform would be nice as well. However fairly soon they updated their roadmap and they had split off the Linux support from this release, leaving in only support for Mac OSX. On the 13th of August they finally released a first sneak peak of some of the new features in RAD Studio XE, which they had named it rather than 2011. I’m however somewhat disappointed to say that there was not the slightest mention of cross-platform compiling in this sneak peak. On the 17th they will release the next in a series of 3 previews, so I guess we better wait for those.
So what’s new in RAD Studio XE?
I’m not going to include an entire feature list here, you can find most of these on the preview page, however I must say I’m personally very excited about 2 additions to RAD Studio. The first of which is subversion support. A lot of people using other VCS systems like Hg, Git and CVS will probably feel a bit left out here, but subversion is one of the most popular ones out there, it will be quite nice to have it tied into the work environment. The second thing that really got my attention was that they finally included “Delphi for PHP”, now named RadPHP in RAD Studio. Up until now Delphi for PHP has remained a separated product, but this new generation of the product which seems to have made tremendous progress has now been included in RAD Studio, making the RAD Studio package an even sweeter deal. RadPHP’s VCL features a lot of great components with even FaceBook support. We’ll probably find out more in 2 days when the next preview has been released, but even though most people will be disappointed not to find any details on the cross-platform support, for a first preview it seems like they made a lot of progress since the last release.