OT - MEETING - Cross-Platform Mobile Dev with Delphi XE8

[David Schwartz]

Hey, guys

I hope it’s ok to promote this here, as I suspect there may be some folks interested.

I’d like to invite you to a meeting I’ll be leading next Tuesday, 4/28, where we’ll be talking about Cross-Platform Mobile Dev with Delphi XE8

The announcement can be found here:

http://delphixe8overview.eventbrite.com

It’s co-sponsored by DeskHub and Embarcadero Software, and is free to attend and open to the public.

My intention is that this be the first of a regular monthly meeting series where we’ll talk about various topics of current interest, with a focus on RAD Studio and AppMethod as the implementation platform.

My goals are to share a few unique aspects of the language or part of the run-time library each month. Some of the things they’ve got are fairly innovative and make leveraging IoT much easier than you might expect.


Many companies are adopting a “mobile-first” strategy to app development these days. This is messing up the way they’ve been approaching things historically, when all they had to worry about was building something in one platform, eg., Windows or Linux.

Now if they want cross-platform native mobile support, they have to choose between Swift or Objective-C for iOS, Java for Android, and any number of languages for middle-tier and back-end services. 

Or if they prefer web-based apps, then it’s HTML5 and a boat-load of different javascript frameworks and libraries, in addition to the back-end service options.

Delphi allows you to use one source base, ObjectPascal or C++/11, to build native EXEs for Windows, OS X, iOS, and Android. 

You can also build REST/JSON services on the same platform that run under Windows Server, although they’re actively working on the abliity to target LAMP platforms in the near future. (I can’t wait for that, as I detest dealing with Windows servers!)

FWIW, there are open-source versions of Delphi, such as Lazarus and OpenPascal that run under Linux. They’re quite powerful, stable, and are actively supported. They track the changes to the Delphi language fairly well, including the run-time libraries, but beyond that I don’t really have any experience to share.

-David Schwartz