Delphi 10.2 Tokyo

Delphi 10.2 Tokyo has been released today!

The new feature I’m most excited about is the support for Linux server-side. We can now build server applications on Linux, allowing us to deploy webservices and all other kinds of server-side stuff to all those Linux servers out there. Officially only Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and
RedHat Enterprise Linux 7 are supported, but with some tinkering you can also run on some of the other Linux platforms. Other good news for Linux compilation, it is seriously fast!

A feature that’s important to me is Multi-Threading Support for TBitmap, TCanvas and TContext3D. This will allow you to more easily render images in a background thread. Games anyone? Actually I plan to use this feature for my Delphi presentation for teachers at the Dutch Gymnasium schools. Thinking that using a gaming element could get teenage students enthusiastic about programming.
https://www.slbdiensten.nl/slb/nieuws/evenementen/infosessie-programmeertaal-delphi

But there is a lot of other stuff to look into. If you go low-level you might like the fact that the FireMonkey framework now no longer has a purgatory class, making it more predictable an stable.

For the full list of new things take a look at http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/Tokyo/en/What’s_New

Happy 2017

Happy New Year!

With Linux support coming this 2017 it will definitely be a happy new year. What it will bring is support in Delphi for Linux for server-side applications, such as Datasnap and/or REST servers, either running under Apache or as an application. The relevant RTL functionality will all be there, but no User Interface stuff.

And this is great, because it will allow us to deploy web services to Linux Apache servers, and it will also support one of our use cases; deploying low cost, ultra low power, micro servers that are placed at multiple locations inside building.

Keep in mind that if you are running something commercial on a Linux server, MySQL (MySQL Pricing) might be more expensive than you think, because of the licensing model that MySQL uses since Oracle acquired it. Interbase (Interbase pricing) may actually be a better and more affordable solution.

It will be a great 2017!