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Delphi For Win32 and PHP
One name – but two products…

20 February 2007

by Huw Collingbourne

CodeGear has today announced two new products bearing the Delphi name, one of which will target the Win32 platform, while the other will provide a visual development environment for PHP.

The Win32 product, Delphi 2007 (beta codename, ‘Spacely’) follows in the long tradition of Delphi products from Borland (CodeGear’s ‘parent’ company). Unlike the multi-language, dual-platform (Win32/.NET) Borland Developer Studio, Delphi 2007 will be a single-language, ObjectPascal, product which will target Win32 development only.

Delphi 2007 - transparently at home on Vista.

When I spoke to Michael Swindell (CodeGear vice president of products and strategy), he told me that the biggest new feature of Delphi 2007 would be its native support for Vista development. It will handle all the fancy effects of the Vista Aero graphics system such as glassy windows, taskbar thumbnails and so on. The software will also feature a few other new things such as support for MS Build with pre-build and post-build events and DBX4 – a database architecture which can be used with SQL Server, Interbase and Oracle.

While Delphi 2007 is an entirely predictable release, following in a long line of ObjectPascal IDEs from Borland/CodeGear, Delphi For PHP (beta codename, ‘Astro’) is a new departure for the company. That said, the product itself is not entirely new. Anyone with a keen interest in PHP development will probably already be aware of a product called QStudio which was announced in 2006 by Spanish development company, Qadram. QStudio was originally scheduled for release in December 2006 and, at the time of writing, the Qadram site still claims that it will be available as freeware:

What is qstudio’s license?
qstudio is freeware. That means you can copy it without any restriction and use it on as many computers as you want, for educational, personal, commercial, or any other purpose.

However, between the end of last year and the launch of Delphi For PHP, there appear to have been some significant changes in direction which the Qadram site has yet to reflect.

Swindell tells me, “We’ve partnered with Qadram who developed QStudio. We’ve been working with them for some time and some of the Qadram folks will now be working with us here in Scotts Valley.”

So how about the free version promised on Qadram’s site?

“That information will be removed. Delphi For PHP will make QStudio redundant.”

Delphi For PHP - Delphi, but not as we know it... Delphi For PHP certainly looks very similar to the traditional Delphi Win32 IDE. It has drag-and-drop controls that create bits of PHP ‘event-handling’ code which can then be hand-edited. The product comes with its own class library (‘VCL For PHP’) to support its visual design features. Swindell tells me that, while Delphi For PHP itself only runs on Windows, the resulting applications can be deployed on any platform that supports PHP.

Pricing and Availability

Delphi 2007 for Win32 can be ordered today and will ship simultaneously in English, German, Japanese and French in March. Delphi 2007 for Win32 Professional new user pricing is $899, upgrade pricing is $399. Delphi 2007 for Win32 Enterprise new user pricing is $1,999, upgrade pricing is $1,299. For more information on system requirements, languages, pricing and availability, visit www.codegear.com/products/delphiwin32.

Delphi for PHP is scheduled to be available in March. The product will be available for an introductory price of $249; special academic pricing will also be available. For more information on system requirements, languages, pricing and availability, visit www.codegear.com/products/delphiforphp.