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…