Embarcadero has made a significant announcement of launching the community edition for its premium products Delphi, a cross-platform IDE and C++Builder, a powerful C++ IDE.
With the community edition, the developers can start using both the products without any charge and access most of the features that are part of the Professional Edition. Apart from the developers, they have the free access to the organizations with less than $5,000 in annual revenue.
This announcement is getting a big welcome in the community, considering the offerings for developers, startups, freelancers who have struggled to enter the Delphi ecosystem for years. Delphi has been unpopular among the native applications developers. This may be because of the entry point pricing. As such, this move seems to ease that barrier at least for the developers, using different IDEs. Delphi’s community edition is said to provide access to all the features and components from the Professional edition. This will permit developing open source projects at no cost to the developers.
Apart from the normal community edition offering, Delphi and C++Builder have free trial versions of the Pro, Enterprise, and Architect version of the products available.
Embarcadero did not talk about RAD Studio, one of the 3 premium tools apart from Delphi and C++Builder in its lineup. RAD Studio is a platform to write, compile, and deploy cross-platform applications.
You can download the starter edition for Delphi and C++Builder from the Embarcadero’s community website. In case you want to try other offerings, you can opt for a 30 days trial.
Delphi 10.2 community is amazing!
The best version of Delphi I tried…
For example, with the included FireDac drivers you need just 5 lines of code to programmatically create a SQLite db crypted with AES 256:
FDConnection1.Params.Clear;
FDConnection1.Params.DriverID := ‘SQLite’;
FDConnection1.Params.Database := StrBaseFolder + ‘\’ + StrFileName;
FDConnection1.Params.NewPassword := ‘aes-256:’ + SPass;
FDConnection1.Connected := True;