Embarcadero Compilers

Embarcadero Delphi, formerly CodeGear Delphi and Borland Delphi, is a software development environment for Microsoft Windows applications originally developed by Borland and now owned and developed by Embarcadero Technologies.

Delphi was originally a confidential research project at Borland which evolved into a product that was to be called AppBuilder. Shortly before the first release of Borland's AppBuilder, Novell AppBuilder was released, leaving Borland in need of a new name.

Developer Danny Thorpe chose the Delphi codename in reference to the Oracle at Delphi. 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 database; 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.

The chief architect behind Delphi was Anders Hejlsberg, who had developed Turbo Pascal. He moved to Microsoft in 1996 to work on C#. This is why C# looks and feels like an extended version of Delphi.

Disadvantages

Backward compatibility - Delphi evolution has retarded due to the products goal of being backward compatible.

Advantages

Delphi is a strongly typed high-level programming language.

Strings can be concatenated by using the ' ' sign, rather than using functions.

The language is suitable for Rapid Application Development (RAD) and comes with an integrated IDE.

The quick optimizing single pass compiler can compile to a single executable, thus simplifying distribution and eliminating DLL version issues.

The Delphi IDEs since Delphi 2005 increasingly support advanced refactoring features such as Method Extraction, etc. and the possibility to create UML models from the source code or to modify the source through changes made in the model.

Delphi has large communities on Usenet and the web (e.g. news:newsgroups.codegear.com) which help solving problems of individual developers. Many Codegear employees actively participate in those communities. A voluntary team (TeamB) also helps out.

• Website: http://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi