History of Delphi

Turbo Pascal, later Borland Pascal, was a low-cost compiler. It went through a number of revisions over the years, and was used mainly to produce programs to run on text displays. When the use of graphical user interfaces became viable with Microsoft Windows 3, Delphi, using augmented Borland Pascal as its underlying language, was introduced. Delphi was one of the first of what came to be known as Rapid Application Development (RAD) tools when released in 1995 for the 16-bit Windows 3.1.

Delphi 2, released a year later, supported 32-bit Windows environments, and a variant using C++ as the underlying language, C++ Builder, followed a few years later.

The chief architect behind Delphi was Anders Hejlsberg, who had developed Turbo Pascal. He moved to Microsoft in 1996.

In 2001 a Linux version named Kylix was released. It was criticised as being of low quality and did not sell well, and was abandoned after version 3.

Attempts to support both Linux and Windows for cross-platform development were made, and a cross-platform version of the VCL known as CLX shipped in 2002 with the release of Delphi 6. The CLX technology effort has faded, and with the failure of Kylix, the CLX was abandoned too.

Since version 1.0, database development remains one of Delphi's strongest points. The Visual Component Library (VCL) contains a large library of database aware controls, and database access components. The Borland Database Engine was the original database connection layer, and was the only choice in the early versions of Delphi, although it is now seldom used, the latest version still ships with the BDE as an installable option.

Delphi 7, released in August 2002, became the standard version used by more Delphi developers than any other single version, and remains still actively used to this date.

Delphi 7 added support for Windows XP Themes, and added more support for building Web applications. It was also the last version of Delphi which can be used without Activation. It has an optional registration feature, that can be ignored.

Delphi 8, released December 2003, was a .NET-only release that allowed developers to compile Delphi Object Pascal code into .NET CIL.

Delphi 8 significant IDE improvement is that it changed for the first time from the multiple-floating-window-on-desktop style IDE to a look and feel similar to Microsoft's Visual Studio.NET. The new IDEs still have the "Classic Undocked" windows layout available as an option.

The next version, Delphi 2005 (Delphi 9), included the Win32 and .NET development in 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 and added a for ... in statement (like C#'s foreach) to the language. However, it was criticized by some for its bugs; both 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 combined development of C# and Delphi.NET, Delphi Win32 and C++ into a single IDE. It was much more stable than Delphi 8 or Delphi 2005 when shipped, and improved even more with the release of service packs and several hotfixes.

On February 8, 2006 Borland announced that it was looking for a buyer for its IDE and database line of products, which include Delphi, to concentrate on its ALM line. The news met with voluble optimism from the remaining Delphi users.

On September 6, 2006 The Developer Tools Group (the working name of the not yet spun off company) of Borland Software Corporation released single-language versions of Borland Developer Studio, bringing back the popular Turbo name. The Turbo product set includes Turbo Delphi for Win32, Turbo Delphi for .NET, Turbo C++, and Turbo C#. Each version is available in two editions: Explorer — a free downloadable version — and Professional — a lower - priced (US$899 for new user, US$399 for update) version which opens access to thousands of third-party components. Unlike earlier Personal editions of Delphi, new Explorer editions can be used for commercial development.

On November 14, 2006 Borland announced that rather than selling the development tools group it would spin it off into an independent subsidiary company named CodeGear.

Delphi 2007, the first version by CodeGear, was released on March 16, 2007. The Win32 personality was released first, before the .NET personality of Delphi 2007 was released, as part of the CodeGear RAD Studio 2007 product. New features included support for MS Build and enhancements to the Visual Component Library for Windows Vista. CodeGear also introduced DBX4 as the next version of dbExpress. For the first time Delphi could be downloaded from the Internet and activated with a license key. Internationalized versions of Delphi 2007 shipped simultaneously in English, French, German and Japanese. RAD Studio 2007, which includes .NET and C++Builder development, was released on September 5, 2007.

The next version, Delphi 2009 (code named Tiburón and unreleased as of 2008-07-22), will add many new features such as completely reworking the VCL and RTL for full Unicode support, adding generics and anonymous methods (for both Win32 native and .Net development).

Borland sold CodeGear to Embarcadero in 2008. Embarcadero is retaining the CodeGear division created by Borland to identify its tool and database offerings, and Embarcadero has decided to identify its own database tools under the DatabaseGear moniker.

Source: Wikipedia