Delphi

Delphi is a rapid application development (RAD) environment using the language of the same name, a derivative of Object Pascal. It is the successor of the famous Turbo and Borland Pascal. The language allows both object oriented and plain structured programming. The language is very rich and powerful and is usable for high level programming as well as for programming close to the bare metal. It even has a built-in Win32 x86 assembler. Delphi is, in my opinion, the best language and the best RAD tool for native Windows.

Version 1 supported 16 bit Windows, and versions 2 and higher support 32 bit Windows. Delphi 8 did not support native programming, but created programs for Microsoft .NET 1.1 instead. Later versions, 2005, 2006, and 2007 allowed programming to both native Win32 as well as for .NET. These programming environments also come as a RAD Studio, which had different "personalities" for each of the supported languages. In RAD Studio 2005, there was also a personality for Microsoft's C# compiler, and since RAD Studio 2006, also for C++Builder. Later versions omitted the C# personality.

Delphi also has its own GUI framework for Windows, the famous VCL (visual component library), which makes the creation of user interfaces very simple. There is a VCL for .NET, but Delphi 2005 and 2006 also allow the use of .NET's own Windows Forms library. Later versions do not allow WinForms programming anymore, and in RAD Studio 2009, the Delphi for .NET personality was omitted. Instead, it is delivered with Delphi Prism, which uses the Oxygene language, also a derivative of Object Pascal, but not quite the same as the Delphi language. It does not use the IDE (integrated development environment) of RAD Studio, but runs in Microsoft's Visual Studio (or the free Visual Studio Shell).

Delphi was originally developed by Borland, but was later phased out (together with the other development products) into a company called CodeGear. CodeGear was then acquired by a development company Embarcadero, which, until then, mainly produced environments for database programming.

More information on Delphi can be found on the Embarcadero website.

Issues with or about Delphi can be discussed on the numerous Delphi newsgroups (using NNTP and a newsreader) or web forums on the Embarcadero server. Just subscribe to the embarcadero.public.delphi.* newsgroups or Embarcadero Delphi discussion forums which best fit the subjects in which you are interested. You can find more information on the Embarcadero information page for them.

You can also find a lot of information and articles around Delphi on the Embarcadero Developer Network. Take a look at my Links page, too.