Why cross-platform Delphi would be attractive for the development market

The market is missing a cross-platform object-oriented RAD tool including a full tool chain. Today, Developers needing to target both the Linux and Windows platforms don’t have much choice – they either need to use Java, which is inadequate in many areas, or they have to work with two completely different tool chains on both platforms. It’s not the programming language that really matters here, it’s the tool chain – Windows and Linux offer completely different interfaces for Database programming, for example. Delphi on the other hand offers an abstraction layer on all of Windows’s APIs. The DBExpress technology of Delphi for example is something completely unmatched in the market – it allows you to use the exact same Database access layer on both Windows and Linux, being completely neutral to the underlying Database system. For non-Delphi solutions, porting your application from Microsoft SQL Server to Linux MySQL or Oracle often means rewriting lots of code – with the Delphi tool chain, it is not much more than a matter of a recompile.

The biggest advantage of Delphi in the cross-platform market therefore isn’t the Delphi language – it’s the full tool chain Borland has created during the last 10 years that makes Delphi so attractive for a cross-platform target.

Therefore it can be assumed that such an offering would not only be interesting to existing Delphi users, but would also attract new customers switching to it from your competitors.