We're in the middle of preparing the May round of product releases, due later this week, and i wanted to start highlighting some of the cool new features we've added in RemObjects SDK and Data Abstract.

The first item i want to highlight are Message Envelopes, an extension to the general RO messaging infrastructure that adds a lot of flexibility and enabled many cool things.

In essence, message envelopes allow you to take control of the message data that's being set out or received over the wire, and change that data, where necessary.

In the past doing this required manually handling of some events and careful coordination of what was doing done on client and server side to get things right - else client and server would no longer understand each other. Message Envelopes, instead, form an official part of the RO messaging pipeline and will be applied in a controlled fashion, allowing clients and servers to use different configurations of envelopes, for example. Message Envelopes can also be combined arbitrarily, allowing applications to take advantage of functionality provided by different envelope implementations at the same time.

One of the most obvious uses of message envelopes (and one of the most-demanded feature in the past) is their use for data security - applying some sort of encryption or signing to a message as it gets sent out, and decrypting/validating it on the way in. We've received so many requests for this, in fact, that the first message envelope implementation we ship as part of the SDK is an encryption envelope based on the popular symmetric AES/Rijndal algorithm.

Making your client/server communication secure is now a matter of dropping a component, and setting an encryption key (pass phrase) on both sides. And it works cross-platform too, between Delphi and .NET (and soon OS X/iPhone) apps.

But Message Envelopes aren't just about what we ship in the box. The AES envelope is both a great feature and a good sample, bit the real power of Message Envelopes lies in allowing users or third parties to write their own, easily adding additional data processing layers to any RO application.

To read more about Message Envelopes, check out the Wiki page at http://wiki.remobjects.com/wiki/Message_Envelopes. And stay tuned for the release of RemObjects SDK 5.0.31 later this week...

“hbf” — see it on dwarfland.com

Berlin Central Station, HDR of 23 (!) exposures — May 14, 2008

They say a picture says more then a thousand words, so here we go:

What are we seeing here?

In the background, there's the .NET version of our standard "MegaDemo" sample server that we've been shipping for years. In this case, it's running using Mono/WinForms right on the Mac, but it might as well be running on a Linux or Windows server far away.

In the front (and not out to win the Apple 2008 Design Award, mind you) is a native Mac OS X application based on what will eventually become "RemObjects SDK for Mac OS X" (or something like that). You're looking at a 100% Objective-C Cocoa application build in Xcode 3, making use of our pure Objective-C implementation of the RO client stack.

Oh, and: a similar app might of course be found running on an iPhone or iPod touch nearby, but i do not want to tempt the NDA gods by posting pictures of it, you'll understand ;).

Want to know more? let me know. we're still looking for a few dedicated testers for when this goes into beta, hopefully later this month.

“Trains” — see it on dwarfland.com

Berlin — April 27, 2008

Today, May 1, marks the third anniversary of Chrome, which was officially launched on May 1, 2005.

Chrome 1.0 was a landmark release, being the first full-featured third-party language integrated into Visual Studio. It opened up Pascal for the .NET framework, and introduced exciting new features such as Class Contracts (loosely based on Eiffel's Design By Contract, Asynchronous Methods and more.

A mere six months later, on November 7 2005, Chrome 1.5 (code-named 'Floorshow'), followed with what was essentially a major new version, despite it's .5 version number. Floorshow shipped on the same day as the .NET 2.0 framework and Visual Studio 2005, and it formalized support for these new technologies, including integration with the new IDE and language support for the new features introduced in .NET 2.0, such as generics, iterators, and more.

On August 1 2007, enjoying the longest development cycle yet, we released Chrome 'Joyride', version 2.0. Joyride brought along official support for new and emerging technologies that went beyond .NET 2.0, starting with libraries such as Windows Presentation Foundation and Windows Communication Foundation, and a wide range of extensions to the language, from enhanced nullable types support to sequences and queries and related technologies. Joyride was the first .NET language to ship production level support for LINQ, months before even Microsoft wold ship release versions of C# 3.0 and VB 9.0. Later that year, Joyride customers also saw the introduction of a new SKU which included a free copy of the Visual Studio 2008 IDE.

Finally, last month we announced the upcoming release of Oxygene, version 3.0 and with that the fourth major version of the Chrome language. On schedule for release on May 30, 2008, Oxygene revolutionizes the ways developers will be building multi-threaded applications for the next generation of hardware devices.

While a core focus of the first 3 releases has been to follow where C# and Microsoft were leading the platform, Oxygene is taking the language to the next level, beyond the "essential .NET". With the .NET platform stabilizing and the stream of new technologies coming out of Redmond slowing down, this has given our team the chance to put more focus on driving the language itself, and then parallelism features shipping this month will only be the start of that!

Thank you for your continued support and patronage of Chrome over the past 3 years — and here's to the next three years of Oxygene!