Delphi Technical Seminar in the Netherlands

Just got back from the CodeGear Technical Seminar 'Delphi Technology Previews and Roadmap update' in Amstelveen (near Amsterdam).
At least 180 developers joined this seminar. This seemed to be more then prior years. It was pretty crowded.

Delphi 2007 for Win32: DBX4
After a short introduction by David I, Pawel Glowacki gave an introduction in DBX4, the new cross platform database technology formerly known as dbExpress 3 (win32) and Borland DataProvider (.NET). DBX4 bundles this two technologies into one. For more information on DBX4 you can check Steve Shaughnessy weblog.

Delphi 2007 for Win32: MSBuild
Jason Vokes showed the new built system MSBuild that is bundled with Delphi 2007.

Delphi for PHP
The most interesting part of the seminar, for me, was to  see Delphi for PHP in action. Again CodeGear has a winner here!
Pawel built an PHP application which uses a Connection component, a Query component and a DataSource component that were hooked up, just like Delphi to a grid. No code to be written yet. And all pretty understandable for a Delphi developer with no PHP experience. 
The only difference between Delphi Original and Delphi for PHP seems to be the language. Everything else has the look and feel similar to Delphi.
I found this video showing the demo including the use of a data dictionary.

Although stated in the seminar title there was no roadmap shown. Of course there is on going work in many areas of Delphi but no exact dates or shedules were mentioned. 

Free PHP 5.0 book

OK, so now that we have Delphi for PHP almost on our doorstep it is time for those who don't do PHP yet, but who want to do PHP now, to gather PHP information.

I always wanted to do PHP, but never had, or took, the time to dig in it. Now that CodeGear offers PHP 'the Delphi way' the time might have come to go for it!

During 'googling' for interesting PHP sites I found this free PHP book:

PHP 5.0 Power programming

This book must cover all PHP related stuff because it has more then 700 pages! (For sure didn't read it all yet)
You can download it here. (Like I said its a free PDF download!)

Delphi 2007 for Win32 and Delphi for PHP

As you probably already know CodeGear announced yesterday Delphi 2007 for Win32 and Delphi for PHP. I will not sum up all the features here again because that is done already by many bloggers, but will summarize most of the stuff.

Delphi 2007 for Win32
Delphi 2007 for Win32 is a Win32 personality only. As stated by CodeGear this is a direct result of the Delphi Survey. Delphi 2007 is a Studio member and therefor it will be integrated in the next CodeGear Developer Studio codename Highlander.

*Should I upgrade to Delphi 2007?
Good question if you are a BDS2006 user, like I am, you would probably answer this question with no. Why not wait a little longer for Highlander to arrive?
Delphi 2007 is a none dcu breaking version which means that (almost) all your code should run fine. I.o.w. upgrading from BDS2006 should be painless.
CodeGear also offers software assurance, which mean that if you buy Delphi 2007 you would get all the Studio members for the coming year including Highlander. In that case upgrading now would be a wise decision indeed.
If you use Delphi 7 or earlier then you probably are a Win32 developer only, and then this is the moment to upgrade.

*Note this is my interpretation of all the information flooding on the web. Please check the CodeGear websites and blogs for all the details.

Here are some links:
CodeGear Announcement
Delphi 2007 product page
Delphi 2007 Faq
Delphi 2007 Datasheet
Nick Hodges talking about SA (and clearing some confusion)
Answering Questions and Clarifying

Delphi for PHP
Delphi for PHP could be a real winner for CodeGear. Delphi for PHP is a Delphi implementation for PHP, so beware it is not PHP with Object Pascal, it is just PHP the Delphi way done.
Some argue that the name Delphi for PHP is cluttering the Delphi name, because Delphi is known as language (Object Pascal), or was it an IDE, or a framework (VCL). Anyway it will attract attention to Delphi as whole, which is, in my opinion, a good thing.

Delphi for PHP in fact is qstudio from quadram, which I blogged a month ago about. It looked, and looks of course, very familiar with Delphi. Some people already wondered back then......

Did you subscribe to the qadram qstudio newsletter list?
On the qadram site is announced that those people will get a special offer for Delphi for PHP! (Hmmm I think I wait a little longer...)

Here are some links:
CodeGear Announcement
Delphi for PHP product page
Delphi for PHP Faq
Delphi for PHP Datasheet
DNTV: Delphi for PHP introduction

Delphi: Still more to explore

The real fun with Delphi is that you discover functions and tools that were sitting there, probably for years, without being noticed by you at all. A good example is the possibility to search incremental using CTRL+E, which I blogged about a year ago.

Today such an event occured to me again. Suddenly I noticed at the main menuitem 'Component' the item 'Create component template...'.

Humm what would that be?

Component templates gives you the ability to create a 'snapshot' of a component(or several components) at the time of creation that you can place in a category of your toolpalette. With the purpose of using it again as it is. Man so simple but so effective!

For instance how many times did you populate a TOpenDialog to open a Word Document? (Drop the component, set the filters etc.) Now you do this one time, and then create a Component Template named 'TOpenDialogWordDocuments' (or whatever) and next time you need an Open dialog for Word documents  just use the component template and ready!

As said you can use Component Templates with more then one component so that you can 'wrapp up'  components to one component.

Great stuff! At what version of Dephi was this introduced?

CodeGear is gearing up

Well some pretty important announcements are made by CodeGear in the past few days:

1. CodeRage 2007
CodeGear announced a virtual conference called CodeRage 2007. This will be held in the second week of March.
This might be the first (Formerly known BorCon, DevCon) conference that I will be able to join. (No Transatlantic flight needed)
Curious about the session, visit the CodeRage website here.
(At this moment no sessions mentioned, but I'm sure that they will in the coming days.

2. Delphi public field test
Nick Hodges announced the Delphi Public Field test on his blog. As far as I know this is the first time that this is done and it shows the new way of doing things at CodeGear. If you want to join you can apply on his blog.

Well and then there was this 'leaked' information of new Delphi versions in the make. See this blogpost by Marco Cantu for a great summary on all the rumors around Delphi.

After a couple of weeks relative silence (except the CodeGear announcement of course) things are definitely gearing up!

Delphi Astro, Delphi Spacely

Two names popping up in this delphi.non-technical thread for new Delphi versions. According to the thread:

Delphi Spacely - Delphi for Vista (Win32 and AJAX)
Delphi Astro - Delphi for PHP

The source of this information is a Swedish reseller. More info in Swedish through this link.

Although not yet confirmed or announced officially by CodeGear this sounds very interesting to me. (It is by far the first of April so......)

Keep an eye on CodeGear for possible announcements the coming days.