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What’s new in delphi 6

Brian Long kicks off our in-depth Delphi 6 review double-act with a tour of all that’s new in the latest incarnation: what is it, what do you do with it, and is it any good? The wait is over and Delphi 6 is here, so let’s start a journey through the new features and capabilities that have been added. Our Delphi 6 examination is a double-act: I’m going to look at what’s new, and Dave Jewell follows in the next article with a look at the cross-platform development aspects of Delphi 6. There are three flavours of Delphi 6: more or less as before, but the names are slightly different. The most expensive is the Enterprise Edition, then comes the Professional Edition and cheapest is the Personal Edition. If you read Borland’s press release about Delphi 6, you will see that it focuses on a few high- profile areas which, as usual, have been subject to the marketing folks’ whims and been given snappy names (pun unintended): BizSnap, WebSnap and DataSnap. The idea of these names is to suggest how easy it is to assemble and complete projects using these new technologies, but more on these shortly. Whilst earlier versions of Delphi had the emphasis on productivity and performance, Delphi 6 focuses its attention on scalability. Some of the key areas in Delphi 6 are targeting e-Business applications, enter- prise solutions and cross-platform development. That’s not to say the lone developer who writes database applications has nothing to look forward to here. As well as the high profile features, there is a whole raft of improvements and additions. Note that this review is based on a pre-release version (although it was very close to the final build) so some things are susceptible to change in the shipping version. Now, without further ado, let’s start looking at the new features, firstly turning our attention to those that Borland seems to be pushing the hardest (and are found only in the Enterprise Edition).