About (Borland) Delphi

CodeGear Delphi (formerly known as Borland Delphi) is a software development package currently produced by Embarcadero Technologies (On May 7^th 2008 Borland Software Corporation announced that its software development tools division, CodeGear, was to be sold to Embarcadero Technologies for an expected $23 million price and $7 million in CodeGear accounts receivables retained by Borland. The acquisition closed on 30 June 2008 for approximately $24.5 million).

Delphi is mainly used for the development of desktop and enterprise database applications, but it is a general-purpose software development tool suitable for most software projects.

Delphi 2007, the eleventh and latest version, supports the Delphi programming language (Object Pascal fork) and C++ for the 32 bit Microsoft Windows platform, and Delphi and C# for the Microsoft .NET platform. Delphi is distributed in various versions with different features and prices: Personal, Professional, Enterprise (formerly Client/Server) and Architect. Borland Kylix is a now discontinued equivalent to Delphi for the Linux platform.

Delphi and Kylix use the Pascal-based Delphi programming language, and compile Delphi source code into native x86 code or managed .NET code. They include the VCL/CLX (Visual Component Library), support for COM independent interfaces with reference counted class implementations, and support for a large number of third-party components. Interface implementations can be delegated to fields or properties of classes. Message handlers are implemented by tagging a method of a class with the integer constant of the message to handle. A strong emphasis is placed on database connectivity.