Borland Delphi
Encyclopedia : B : BO : BOR : Borland Delphi
Encyclopedia : B : BO : BOR : Borland Delphi
Delphi's most popular use is the development of desktop and enterprise database applications, but as a general-purpose development tool it is capable of, and is used for most types of development projects.
The Delphi product is distributed as various suites: Personal, Professional, Enterprise (formerly Client/Server) and Architect.
The chief architect behind Delphi, and its predecessor Turbo Pascal, was Anders Hejlsberg until he was headhunted by Microsoft in 1996, where he worked on Visual J++ then subsequently became the chief designer of C# and a key participant in the creation of the Microsoft .NET Framework.
In 2001 a Linux version known as Kylix became available. However, due to the lack of interest from the Linux community, Kylix was stalled at version 3.
Support for Linux and Windows cross platform development (through Kylix and the CLX component library) was added and in 2002 with the release of Delphi 6.
Delphi 8, released December 2003, was the first to support and only supported developing in the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1. It allowed developers to compile Delphi Object Pascal code into .NET MSIL. It was also significant in that it changed its IDE for the first time since its conception from the multiple floating window on desktop style IDE to a look and feel similar to Microsoft's Visual Studio.NET.
Although Borland fulfilled one of the biggest requests from developers (.NET support), it was criticised for making it available too late, when a lot of former Delphi developers have already moved away to C#. There were also concerns about the future of Delphi Win32 development. Because Delphi 8 did not support Win32, Delphi 7.1 was included in the Delphi 8 package.
The subsequent version, Delphi 2005 (Delphi 9), included the Win32 and .NET development into a single IDE, reiterating Borland's commitment to Win32 developers. Delphi 2005 includes design-time manipulation of live data from a database. It also includes an improved IDE. However, was criticised by some for its bugs. Delphi 8 and Delphi 2005 had stability problems when shipped which were only partially resolved in service packs.
In late 2005, Delphi 2006 was released and federated development of C# and Delphi.NET, Delphi win32 and C++ into one single IDE. It was much more stable when shipped and improved even more after the first service pack.
On February 8th, 2006, Borland announced that it was looking for a buyer for its IDE and Database line of products, which included Delphi, to concentrate on its ALM line.
On May 3rd, 2006, Borland unveiled a massive restructuring plan for the company. It plans to separate its developer tools business, including Delphi, into a separate company.
The codename Delphi was chosen in reference to the Oracle at Delphi by developer, Danny Thorpe. One of the original goals of Delphi was to provide database connectivity to programmers as a key feature and a popular database package at the time was Oracle; hence, "If you want to talk to [the] Oracle, go to Delphi". As development continued, the name grew on them and there was growing support within Borland for the name Delphi.
Shortly before the first release, Novell AppBuilder was released, leaving Borland in need of a new name. After much struggle, the name Delphi prevailed.
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