Tools speed up Windows development

SOFTWARE OUTFIT Embarcadero has released its Embarcadero RAD Studio XE, which is a suite of development tools that help developers come up with fast, native Windows .NET and web software.

RAD Studio XE includes versions of Delphi, C++Builder, Delphi Prism, and now RadPHP XE.

A lot of the work has been done to the new XE releases of Delphi and C++Builder that allow developers to interact with cloud computing environments. Users can create applications to access Microsoft Windows Azure platform storage blob, queue and table services.

Developers can also deploy server applications with 'push-button deploy' to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) environment and access them from multiple types of thin-client applications.

The Datasnap framework gives developers more options for building multi-tier solftware, which means they can build applications with both C++Builder and Delphi. There are wizards for creating server software and client modules and support for Javascript, REST and HTTP and HTTPS transport protocols.

The software includes all this and an integrated set of tools for testing, performance profiling and build automation which are designed to help QA streamline the development processes.

User Jay Huber, senior software architect for First Trust Portfolios, a financial securities firm said his outfit had been using Delphi for many years as its primary development framework for building hundreds of business-critical programs.

With the new XE release of Delphi and RAD Studio he has his paws on a new feature set, including a regular expression library and tools like AQtime and Beyond Compare that he said will further streamline development processes and increase the efficiency of development teams.

There are a few deals around, apparently, as the company tries to encourage early adopters. µ