DelphiLive! 2009 was excellent:-)

I'm back from DelphiLive! 2009 conference and I'm very excited about Delphi and where it is going. Delphi developers were so happy to see how relevant Delphi is in the modern world of computing. After plenty of disclaimers we saw some of the features for upcoming Delphi "Weaver" release and beyond.

Marco Cantu posted nice summaries on his blog from conference Day 2 and Day 3 (Day 1&4 was pre- and post-conference tutorials) and here is the summary from Nick Hodges: "DelphiLive was a real gas" :-)



During the opening keynote Michael Swindell demonstrated "Delphi Natural Input" and fragments from "Quantum of Solace" and "Minority Report" related to new generation of user interface experience. The touch-based user input combined with VCL support for native Direct2X graphics makes for great demos. Daniel Magin has posted cool YouTube episodes from packed Chris Bensen's session including touch, Direct2X, multitouch and enabling classic Delphi 1 "Fishfact" demo for gesturing. Chris discussed what touch is, why it is cool, and also upcoming VCL support for built-in and custom gestures.





I have really enjoyed "Delphi Compiler RTTI Enhancements" session. Barry Kelly is such a smart guy. Danny Thorpe used to have similarly interesting sessions in the past. The new RTTI is "roughly isomorphic with .NET/Java reflection" to quote Barry;-) No more pointers to get to the RTTI information! Barry demonstrated "Class Browser" demo application that recursively went through all types inside Delphi. Very impressive. The other cool thing during this session was upcoming support for custom attributes in Delphi native compiler similar to what we had in Delphi for .NET compiler in the past.



I have also enjoyed Daniel Magin session on InterBase SMP 2009 security features including database, table and column encryption and over-the-wire security. Danny knows what he is talking about. He's real InterBase expert. InterBase SMP 2009 runs on Windows, Linux, Solaris and MacOSX, on the hardware with up to 8 CPUs. You get all the performance and enterprise RDBMS features for a fraction of competitors prizes. Unfortunatly I have missed Daniels "Subversion" evening session.



Since the introduction of DBX4 database driver architecture in Delphi 2007 I have become a big fan of this technology. Delphi 2009 introduced new DataSnap architecture for building multitier database applications, and in fact arbitrary client/server systems in a truly RAD manner. I have presented "Delphi 2009 DataSnap Deep Dive" preconference tutorial on the first day and was really eager to see what Delphi R&D is cooking for the upcoming versions of Delphi in the DataSnap area. Sessions from Jim Tierney, Leonel Togniolli, Andreano Lanusse and Adrian Andrei were all devoted to DataSnap. There are many new features "cooking in the labs", like support for additional transports (HTTP, HTTPS, local), hosting DataSnap servers in Web Broker application, REST interfaces, JSON support, filters for customizing over-the-wire communication, tunelling for 3-tier architectures, support for fault-tolerance and improved Delphi Prism support including client proxy generator to name just a few.





The DelphiLive! conference was very successful and Delphi community truly enjoyed it. We are all looking forward to the next year. In the meantime book your agenda and submit papers for the upcoming virtual Embarcadero CodeRage IV conference on September 9-11. Call for papers is already open.

[caption id="attachment_38719" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Me and David I - our Chief Evangelist"][/caption]