Embarcadero Technologies, a provider of software solutions for cross-platform application and database development, has released its largest release of RAD Studio in a decade, “RAD Studio 10 Seattle.” A primary goal of the new release is to help Embarcadero’s community of three million C++ and Delphi developers easily get new and existing applications on Windows 10, plus OS X, iOS, and Android platforms
RAD Studio 10 Seattle enhances software development productivity with an improved IDE (integrated development environment), runtime performance, and quality across all platforms; over 20 new coding productivity innovations; and double the IDE project size capacity.
Windows 10, the latest release of Microsoft’s operating system which was released at the end of July, has had a quick uptake, said Michael Swindell, senior vice president of products at Embarcadero. He put the current number of Windows 10 installations at 75 million at the end of last week, but said the numbers are changing quickly. “There was big pent-up demand.” According to Embarcadero, the company has the largest Windows developer base outside of Microsoft itself.
Windows 10 is much more attractive than was Windows 8 because the user experience is more simple and pleasant, said Swindell. “This is something we have also enabled across all of our tools to make it really simple for an existing Windows developer to point and click to simply upgrade their application to the new Windows look and feel with very little effort.”
In addition, he said, Microsoft has also added new services to the platform, such as push notifications, Cortana, the personal assistant for Windows 10, and search capabilities. “All of these new services that Microsoft has added, we have also encapsulated and integrated into the development environment so it is really ease for developers to add those services to their applications.”
Microsoft also has a new set of APIs and frameworks called Universal Windows Platform. All of these are now available to developers throughout the Universal Windows Platform services and Embarcadero has also added that into the development environment, said Swindell.
A major advantage with the new Embarcadero release is that by simply loading any Windows application into RAD Studio and rebuilding, it, a developer will be upgrading the application to the Windows 10 look and feel, which, said Swindell, is by far the biggest change the end users will see with Windows 10.
“We have a lot of customers building healthcare applications, manufacturing applications, and financial applications that have rich user interfaces and those will immediately be able to be upgraded. All developers that have built applications with older versions of our toolset will be able to upgrade their applications seamlessly,” he said. Any developer can use the new release to build new Windows 10 applications as well as extend them to OS X, mobile, and IoT platforms.
Addressing a need to accommodate larger, cross-platform projects, the new release doubles the IDE project capacity. “Developers’ platforms have gotten larger and larger, and so we have basically doubled the power of the IDE and the capacity of the IDE to handle large projects to make the experience faster and richer for developers building on multiple platforms with large projects,” Swindell noted. And, introducing its first support for a NoSQL database, the new release adds support for MongoDB in addition to relational platforms such as SQL Server, DB2, Oracle, MySQL, and InterBase.
The release also introduces a CLANG enhanced C++ compiler and support for the new C++11 standard.
RAD Studio 10 Seattle, Delphi 10, and C++Builder 10 are available immediately from Embarcadero and its partners. For additional details, go to https://store.embarcadero.com and www.embarcadero.com/products/rad-studio/downloads.