We’re hitting the ground running for 2012 and finished January with the first two product releases of the year.
Hydra 4
Hydra 4 is a major new release for our .NET/Delphi cross-platform product, and one we’re very excited about. Hydra has been at version 3 for a while now and seen mostly incremental changes, but with version 4 we’re adding three major new features/platforms to the mix:
- Support for 64-bit Delphi Host Applications and Plugins
- Support for FireMonkey Host Applications and Plugins
- Support for hosting Silverlight-based Plugins
Compiling true 64-bit Windows applications has been on the wish-list for Delphi developers for a long time, and Delphi XE2 finally provided the elusive support, and Hydra has been updated to match. This makes it easier to build applications that use large amounts of memory, can interact with .NET plugins in 64-bit space, or simply run more natively on the 64-bit Windows systems that are standard these days.
FireMonkey is Embarcadero’s new framework for creating rich “HD” or 3D graphical user interfaces in Delphi, and it is destined to supersede the VCL sooner or later. Unfortunately, Embarcadero does not let applications mix FireMonkey (FMX) and VCL by default — but that is no reason to jump ship to FireMonkey and discard all your existing VCL code. Hydra adds FireMonkey to its list of platforms supported by plugins and lets you seamlessly mix new FireMonkey UI alongside existing VCL code or even among WinForms and WPF. And FireMonkey host support lets you create new FMX applications and integrate existing VCL (or WinForms and WPF) code and UI into them, as well.
Finally, there’s Silverlight, Microsoft’s platform for rich web controls and (more prominently, as of recent) Windows Phone 7. Silverlight is based on the same concepts as .NET but uses a smaller and a tad more limited runtime — in exchange it can run in Browsers on Windows and Mac, as well as on Microsoft’s new phone platform. With Hydra 4, Silverlight can now also run in your Delphi (or .NET) based host applications, alongside other plugins. This allows you to easily share code and visual elements between your web application and your desktop app, or between your phone and your desktop.
We think Hydra 4 will be an essential tool for the modern Delphi developer — whether to add .NET to your Delphi projects or to add FireMonkey.
Hydra 4 is a free update to all users with an active subscription and available for immediate download. If your subscription expired before January 27, you can renew now for $249 to get access to Hydra 4; the price for new users is $499, including on year of free updates (and we do have more exciting stuff planned for Hydra in 2012!). Of course Hydra 4 is also included in the Suite Subscriptions for both .NET and Delphi.
Oxygene — January 2012 Release
Last November, we shipped a major new release of Oxygene, introducing the brand new Oxygene for Java as second platform for everyone’s favorite modern Object Pascal.
After skipping the holidays, we’re back to our monthly release cycle, and the January 2012 release kicks the year off with a large range of fixes and enhancements for both .NET and Java/Android developers. Altogether, the change log contains over 170 improvements.
The new Oxygene build is a free update for all customers with an active subscription, including all users of Prism XE2 and RAD Studio XE2.
For those of you using Oxygene for both .NET and Java, the update (like all future updates) is a combined installer — it will automatically detect if you have both editions of Oxygene and update both.
Get Em While They’re Hot
Head over to our trials download page at remobjects.com/trials now to give Hydra 4 or Oxygene a spin. Or if you’re already a customer, visit the downloads page on your customer portal to get the latest versions.
Oxygene and Hydra go great together by the way. If you’re a Delphi-only developer right now but thinking about adding .NET code to your application, Hydra makes that easy, and Oxygene lets you keep using the familiar Object Pascal language, even for your .NET work.
