Japan part of my "round the world tour in 13 days" is completed - in Germany now

I arrived last Sunday night in Tokyo for the start of my round the world your in 13 days.  I am in Germany now on my way to Cologne for the Delphi Tage 2011.  Here is a recap of the Japan part of my tour.

Monday - Tokyo – 3 press interviews for RAD Studio XE2.  The press members like the Multi-Platform and Mobile story for RAD Studio XE2.  Mobile application development is a big deal here (and all over the world) and we are happy to be able to deliver multiple solutions for developers in RAD Studio XE2 (with more to come):

• iOS native code FireMonkey applications - use the RAD Studio XE2 IDE and FireMonkey to build your iOS application including the UI, event handlers and logic.  Migrate the project to an XCode project using the DPR2XCODE project converter.  Add Pascal code for the iOS specific hardware and operating system logic (iPhoneAll.pas).  Compile the project with the included Free Pascal Compiler and FireMonkey + RTL libraries.  Debug and deploy from XCode.


• Mobile connectors for DataSnap XE2 - build your native code DataSnap XE2 application servers using Delphi and C++Builder.  Generate source code interfaces for your DataSnap server class methods to Objective-C, Java Blackberry, Java Android, C# Windows Phone 7, Delphi, C++Builder, RadPHP, Prism, and JavaScript.  Build mobile client applications that can call the interfaces.


• RadPHP XE2 iOS and Android mobile client applications that work with your PHP servers - Use RadPHP JQueryMobile components to build the UI and access the mobile hardware.  Use RadPHP XE2's PhoneGap wizard to generate native client applications for iOS and Android that take the client side JavaScript, HTML and CSS from your RadPHP XE2 project.


• Prism XE2 support for Windows Phone 7 application development - With Embarcadero Prism XE2 you have full support for .NET, Silverlight and Microsoft based phones.  Prism XE2 has project wizards to get you started building mobile applications.  You can use the Windows Phone 7 SDK emulator to debug your applications before you deploy them.

Tuesday - Tokyo– Developer Camp in Akihabara (sad that I did not have time to do some electronics shopping) with more than 130 enthusiastic attendees. I did three sessions:  RAD Studio XE2 Product Address, What’s New in Delphi/C++Builder and Multi-Platform Development with FireMonkey.   Attendees love the 64-bit Delphi (also want 64-bit C++ which is on our roadmap).  They really liked FireMonkey development for Delphi/C++ for Windows/OSX and iOS (Delphi for now).  Cloud computing is also taking hold in Japan.  RAD Cloud support in RAD Studio XE2 includes Delphi/C++ components for cloud storage (blobs, tables, queues) on Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure.  You can also deploy your applications from the IDE to Amazon and Azure using the Platform Assistant.  Mobile application development solutions across RAD Studio XE2 solutions was hot hot hot – both for Delphi and RadPHP.

[caption id="attachment_41197" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Tokyo Developer Camp"][/caption]

The last session was a technology lightning round where each presenter was given five minutes to show something really cool (see a picture of the participants below). More about the lightning round talks in another blog post.  In the evening, we had a dinner in the evening with the top developers/speakers/partners with lots of excitement for RAD Studio XE2 and the future of multi-platform, cloud, and mobile development. I had a wonderful conversation with Tateo Nagai, group manager for life science solutions, who uses Delphi in his project team was excited to show RAD Studio XE2 to more of the developers at his entire corporation. He also used Delphi to build a home accounting application using Delphi and can now create a Macintosh version of the same application with Delphi XE2.

[caption id="attachment_41198" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Developer Camp Lightning Round Presenters"][/caption]

Wednesday – Kobe - We travelled to the 2011 CodeZine Kansai Developers Summit in Kobe. I gave a Multi-Platform 45 minute talk with demos of FireMonkey and iOS support in Delphi XE2 and iOS/Android support in RadPHP XE2 – lots of interest and smiles among the 80+ people in attendance.  I tried to show everything possible in the 45 minute talk, but there is so much fun to show developers, and I tried to get it all probably driving the simultaneous translators crazy.  Evening dinner with speakers and luminaries in Kobe. Lots of questions about what we are doing with multi-platform and mobile and lots of interest and cheers about what were doing.  I talked about mobile application development with a Microsoft Windows Phone 7 evangelist.  I also had a great conversation with Taro Kawai, R&D Unit Leader for Yahoo Japan Developer Network. It was also wonderful to talk about cloud application and storage with the Tomohide Kubota, senior technical director for Nifty Corporation and their Nifty Cloud solution.   I took a poll of the 32 developers and speakers at the dinner – most had iPhones, about a third had Android phones and 2 had Windows Phone 7 phones.

Thursday – Kansai/HongKong/Frankfurt - long overnight flight from Japan via Hong Kong to Frankfurt Germany to continue the Europe portion of my round the world tour.  Before I left the Japan, the country of the rising sun, here is a picture I took from my Kobe hotel room (woke up at 4am proving that I was still jet lagged).

[caption id="attachment_41207" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="The Rising Sun in Kobe Japan"][/caption]

Thank you Embarcader Japan. Thank you Japanese developers.  Thank you CodeZine Japan.  More from Europe next week.