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RadPHP XE: A first look

September 16, 2010 Frédéric Hannes

I received my license for RAD Studio XE yesterday and I was quite excited to take a look at RadPHP XE. I had not formerly tried Delphi For PHP 1 and 2 and honnestly, I haden’t heard any good things about them either.

A first thing I noticed was that RadPHP does not come as a part of RAD Studio itself. Though the product does integrate into the IDE flawlessly, it is not accessible from RAD Studio itself, neither is it included in the RAD Studio installer. You have to download RadPHP separately and open it separately from the main RAD Studio IDE.

As advertised by Embarcadero, the RadPHP experience feels very much like working with Delphi, it uses the same layout, you create projects the same way etc. The most noticeable projects are the Facebook application and RPCL application. Both of these use the RadPhp Component Library.

When creating a new project some of the differences quickly become obvious. As expected your form designer does not show a form, rather a page, with the same grid layout. The tool palette has a fairly large selection of available components of which many look very familiar. However, this is the point some things started to disappoint me. Though Embarcadero has certainly succeeded at creating a very convenient way to create PHP applications, there’s several things I’m certainly missing. Components do not come with properties like Align, Anchors, Margins and more. A lot of innovative VCL features that were added after Delphi 7 like the ability to use imagelists for buttons are also nowhere to be found in RadPHP. Overall I would say, even though the experience is similar to working with Delphi, the product still has some issues that should be addressed.

RadPHP does seem to have some interesting features nonetheless, such as integration of several 3rd party APIs like Google Maps, the Facebook API, jQuery, etc… Though I would like to have seen some additional Google APIs in there. The product currently seems mostly targeted at the development of Facebook applications.

One thing I checked for was if it came with an OpenTools API like RAD Studio itself, and it does, so it is extensible, maybe we will see some interesting 3rd party tools appearing in the future.

A final thing worth mentioning is that none of the new tools added to RAD Studio such as BeyondCompare are not integrated into the RadPHP IDE, neither is the subversion integration. This may be the result of having installed RadPHP after RAD Studio, but I doubt that is the case.

Conclusion
After having a first look at RadPHP I would have to say it seems it was just added to RAD Studio to have an additional feature in the package. However, with some work it could become a very powerful development tool and hopefully it will in the future.

RAD Studio XE

September 10, 2010 Frédéric Hannes

I visited the launch event for RAD Studio XE in Brussels yesterday, we got a 4 hour presentation about the new features in RAD Studio XE including a set of demos and there was some very tasty Delphi Cake. The cake wasn’t a lie…

I’m going to give you a small summary of what’s new in RAD Studio XE.

What does XE stand for? It stands for Heterogeneous Embarcadero and Toolcloud Enabled. All Embarcadero products will now be named XE, next year RAD Studio 2012 will be named RAD Studio XE 2 and so on.

A lot of focus now goes out to the Embarcadero All-Access product which allows you to access all Embarcadero products instantly including older versions of the products for testing backwards compatibility of your code. All-Access allows you to run these products without installing them and they run using a sort of visualization technology so it’s completely sandboxed.

For the future Embarcadero plans to create a new Delphi compiler which will be more flexible and will be easier to adapt to other platforms. Aside from that they plan to create a new better VCL library, move EDN up to the next level using new modern technologies and more. The x64 and xPlatform support that was going to be in RAD Studio XE has been moved up to the next release because it simply was not ready for release, so that’s certainly something to look out for.

“We do not want to publish another Delphi 8.”

Embarcadero is currently also working on a “Starter” edition of RAD Studio/Delphi which will be free or available for a low price, targeting students and hobbyists.

Inside the IDE we find the new Subversion integration as one of the main new features. It allows you to easily add a project to subversion and work with it, the IDE will only commit files you actually need to have in your repository, being the source files, dfm files, etc… The entire subversion integration has been open-sourced in the open tools api which allows 3rd party developers to modify or even add support for other version control systems into the IDE, however this is not done by default as Subversion is the most popular version control system available today. Subversion support is available in all products in RAD Studio including Delphi Prism. Another addition is improved support for code formatting. The code formatting has been improved upon and now works with profiles which you can import/export so you can format on a project-basis. You can now also format an entire project at once. Command-line support for the formatter has now also been included. A small addition to the form designer is that you now have the ability to copy a form and paste an image of it in for example paint. A last addition that was discussed is the ability to rename threads in the threads debugging view.

The Delphi language itself has gotten no extra additions, only the VCL library has gotten a few improvements and generics have been tweaked further. Embarcadero has however put a lot of effort in making C++ Builder comply with the ISO standards for the language.

UML support in Delphi has been extended, most people do not use the UML integration, but it is quite extensive, it can automatically reverse engineer your project and create an UML diagram for it, you can also add classes and more to your project from the UML diagrams. You now have the ability to generate sequence diagrams of your code in UML which allows you to visually inspect how your code works. Aside from this you can now also easily add ancestors of your classes to the diagrams.

The main focus of the XE release is the DataSnap technology and the newly added support for cloud computing with Windows Azure and Amazon EC2. It is now possible to create DataSnap servers in C++ Builder. Clients can be created in Delphi, C++ Builder, RadPHP, and so on. Extra wizards to create web servers have also been added to the program and the REST protocol for communication between server and client. Furthermore the Windows Azure support is component based, which will allow you to easily interact with the Windows Azure cloud. The cloud computing support for Azure is also very powerful and will let you easily execute functions inside of your server that is running in the cloud from clients as if they were running locally.

I’ll be receiving my own copy of RAD Studio XE Professional in a few days and will share my thoughts about it then.

RAD Studio XE Preview #3

August 24, 2010 Frédéric Hannes

Today Embarcadero released the 3rd and final preview of RAD Studio XE, the preview shows the new ability to generate DataSnap servers in C++ Builder, connectivity to DataSnap servers from C++ Builder, Delphi and RadPHP, the new support for Microsoft Azure cloud computing and more. I’m don’t use most of these technologies myself so I won’t go into detail about them.

Cross-platform Delphi

August 17, 2010 Frédéric Hannes

After doing some further investigation it seems that the cross-platform support for Delphi has yet again been moved up to a next release. The fact that Embarcadero wants to wait for them to fully stabilize the product before releasing it is certainly an admirable thing to do, but it does bring up some questions…

So what does this mean for RAD Studio XE? We’ve seen 2 previews so far, it shows us some nice new features, a lot of integrations of 3rd party applications to make coding more convenient. However, a lot of these applications are limited because they have a paying version, yet there’s barely any or no details on how this is dealt with in RAD Studio. Another somewhat big concern is whether this release is actually worth purchasing when updating from RAD Studio 2010. So far we have seen no actual new Delphi language features being previewed, all that remains is a bunch of new tools in the IDE of which now part only seem to be added to somewhat bulk up the product and make it appear as more than just a bugfix release. Personally I’m waiting for some details on language features, however i must admit that the addition of RadPHP makes the product somewhat more appealing as it had to be purchased separately previously and since the initial release as Delphi for PHP, RadPHP seems to have matured quite a lot.

It seems Embarcadero has also released a new roadmap, though there’s very little communication from the company about why the cross-platform support was moved up or even that it was, it clearly shows on the new roadmap that was released just 6 days ago. The cross-platform support has been jumping around a lot on the roadmap since it was initially announced, but it seems they have now finally brought everything together in a release named project “Pulsar”, which I assume will be Delphi 2012. The release promises to include x64 support for windows applications and the inclusion of cross-platform compiling for 32-bit mac applications, only for Delphi however. The release has no mentioning of Linux support which previously vanished from the roadmap, however it has reappeared in the Wheelhouse release, however note that they carefully refer to the Linux support as support for Linux servers which might suggest it will not support GUI applications. This release will also bring the cross-platform and x64 support to the other RAD Studio products, mainly C++ Builder of course.

It seems to be clear Embarcadero wants to have the product catching up with competing products with the Commodore release, which will feature full 32- and 64-bit support for all platforms. However, when counting the number of projects it would suggest this being part of Delphi 2014. Even though they are certainly making an effort, it seems Embarcadero is once again dropping the ball here as they are already losing many (potential) customers because they do not support 64-bit and cross-platform at the present time, certainly 64-bit support will also become more pressing in the future as gradually more and more platforms are moving over to 64-bit. Will there be a market left for them when they finally catch up with the current day products of their competitors in 3 years from now?

An interesting item that I’m coming across a few times on the roadmap is the considered addition of a cross-platform VCL library. Originally this item was part of the roadmap as a somewhat standard item included with cross-platform support. However it seems that currently they are only considering to add this. How will this affect the cross-platform support? As I mentioned before they are saying that they will only include Linux server support into the Wheelhouse release, that would certainly require no GUI, so a cross-platform VCL library would not be required. However, for the Mac support you would want to be able to build visual applications. When they say they might not include a cross-platform VCL library, I’m guessing this means they intend to add a custom Mac-only library for compiling to Mac, personally i find the thought of this somewhat horrifying, the reason people are so eager to get cross-platform support is obviously to compile their applications to multiple platforms, having more than 1 visual component library needed to do so will obviously complicate things a lot. Because of this I am certainly expecting they will eventually move this feature over to the actual plans for one of the releases.

RAD Studio XE Preview #2

August 17, 2010 Frédéric Hannes

The 2nd RAD Studio XE preview has been released today! After viewing it I find myself a bit disappointed as there is still no mentioning of the cross-platform compiling which was the most anticipated feature of the product. Although there has been no video release of the #3 preview yet which is planned for the 24th, they did already release details on what it’s about, still no mentioning of cross-platform though.

Embarcadero has been building a lot of 3rd party applications into RAD Studio XE, in the 1st preview they already showed the integration of 3rd party difference software and now they’ve added Raize CodeSite, a piece of logging software from their technology partner Raize Software which develops Delphi components and tools, the AQTime profiler and FinalBuilder. The upside to doing this integration is the obvious fact that they don’t have to develop their own versions of these products from scratch but instead can use finished products that have already gone through a lot of releases making them very stable en reliable. The downside is that most of these products are somewhat limited in use unless you purchase their extended versions.

What drew my attention mostly in this preview was the addition of FinalBuilder, it allows you to schedule automated builds. As i understand it, it has been integrated into all of the RAD Studio products which will enable you to create automated builds very easily.

Embarcadero RAD Studio XE

August 15, 2010 Frédéric Hannes

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.