About Borland Delphi

What is Borland Delphi?

Borland Delphi is a sophisticated Windows programming environment, suitable for beginners and professional programmers alike. Using Delphi you can easily create self-contained, user friendly, highly efficient Windows applications in a very short time - with a minimum of manual coding.

Delphi provides all the tools you need to develop, test and deploy Windows applications, including a large number of so-called reusable components. Borland Delphi, in it's latest version, provides a cross platform solution when used with Borland Kylix - Borland's RAD tool for the Linux platform.

Delphi's roots lie in Borland's Turbo Pascal, introduced in the mid-1980s. Object Pascal, the object-oriented extensions to Pascal, is the underlying language of Delphi. The Visual Component Library, or VCL, is a hierarchy of Object Pascal objects that allow you to design applications. A better way of describing Delphi is an Object Pascal-based visual development environment.

Development environment

Delphi's most popular use is the development of desktop and enterprise database applications, but as a general-purpose development tool it is capable of and used for most types of development projects. It was one of the first of what came to be known as RAD tools, for Rapid Application Development, when released in 1995 for 16-bit Windows. Delphi 2, released a year later, supported 32-bit Windows environments, and a C++ version, C++Builder, followed a few years after. In 2001 a Linux version known as Kylix became available. With one new major release every year, in 2002 support for Linux (through Kylix and the CLX component library) was added and in 2003 .NET became supported in Delphi.Net (Delphi 8).

Available Editions

The Delphi product is distributed as various suites: Personal, Professional, Enterprise (formerly Client/Server) and Architect.

Delphi 2005 (brand name for Delphi 9) provides both 32-bit Windows and .NET code generation, and has as its most notable new feature design-time manipulation of live data from a database. It also includes a significantly improved IDE.