Spring 2011

It’s the time of the year again: i am very happy to announce the immediate availability of the “Spring 2011” releases of out entire product suite. Point your browsers to portal.remobjects.com (licensed users) or remobjects.com/trials and remobjects.com/free for free products and trial downloads. Let’s have a look at what’s new:

Data Abstract

We’ve added Business Rules Scripting support in Data Abstract for Delphi, bringing it on par with it’s .NET sibling. Scripting in Delphi is based on ActiveScript/JScript and scripts and the DA scripting API are fully compatible between the two editions; you can have a Delphi client receive client-side scripts from a .NET server and they will run just as they would on a .NET client. We’e also made vast improvements to Business Rules Scripting support in Data Abstract for .NET and it’s now using our completely redesigned RemObjects Script 2.0 (more on that below).

New Schema Modeler and Server Explorer for Mac has left the Tech Preview stage, and has been greatly improved since the Winter 2010 release. It also has much improved support for editing and validating scripts you’re writing for your Relativity Server.

Mobile platform support in Data Abstract for .NET has been extended; we’ve added full DA LINQ support for Mono Touch, and now also support MonoDroid (aka Android for Mono) and Windows Phone 7. This means that (if you don’t want to go native with Data Abstract for Xcode or “Black Lodge”, you now create applications for all three major smartphone platforms in .NET, and potentially share a lot of code between them (although we’d hope you will use MVC to capsulate your UI and create a proper platform-specific UI to make your app great on each platform).

As a minor news item, support for our cross-platform Briefcase Files has now been extended to Data Abstract for Delphi and is now available in all three editions!

RemObjects SDK

As part of DA, RemObjects SDK for .NET has of course also been extended to support Windows Phone 7 and Android; Internet Pack is also supported on Android now (but not on Windows Phone 7, which – like Silverlight in general – does not support network access beyond the APIs provided by the platform.

The TCP ClientChannel has been ported over to RemObjects SDK for Xcode, and we’ve added a new feature we call URL Schemes that allows you to let the framework to automatically pick the right channel and message type based on a full URL (such as tcp://examle.com:8089/soap). This feature debuts in Ro/Xcode but will make its way onto the other RO platforms as well, eventually.

We’ve also added HTTP-level gzip compression in RemObjects SDK for Delphi (which allows you to save bandwidth with non-RO SOAP clients, mainly), and made the AES Encryption Envelope available support for Silverlight in RemObjects SDK for .NET.

RemObjects Script

As mentioned before, RemObjects Script 2.0 as been completely redesigned to no longer depends in the Microsoft Dynamic Language Runtime and run much faster than version 1,0 in most scenarios. It and passes 100% of all tests in the standard EC5 EcmaScript test suite, and we are working on testing it with other common JavaScriopt test suits such as Sputnik, to ensure top script compatibility. The product is now licensed under the BSD license and fully open source; in addition to a packaged installer on our Free Downloads page, you can also access the code from the Git repository on code.remobjects.com

Hydra

Action support in Hydra has been extended to fully support actions and action updates (such as enabling and disabling) across platform boundaries. So a Delphi host application can now incorporate actions driven by a .NET plugin, or vice versa.

Delphi Prism

The official RTM announcement and availability for Delphi Prism will come from our friends at Embarcadero in the next few days, but as part of our RTM cycle, we have also finalized our part of a new Delphi Prism release, which will be a free mainly-bugfix release available to all users of Delphi Prism XE (even RAD Studio customers not on SA). There are a few nice features in there, though, and my favorite ones are the new visual navigation markers that highlight and keep track as you navigate through your code (and go back), as well as inline errors, which highlight places with compiler errors right inside the code editor (similar to and inspired by Xcode). The inline errors are just the tip of the iceberg for some very cool stuff we have coming in the Fall release, too.

Oxfuscator

We shipped the first standalone release of Oxfuscator just in January, so this update merely contains a handful of fixes and brings Oxfuscator in line with what ships in the new Delphi Prism XE spring update mentioned above.

I hope you enjoy these new releases, and let us know what you think!

yours,
marc