As many of you already know I’m maintaining many components for RAD Studio, particularly Delphi. And with every new release of RAD Studio I have to adjust all of them.
In the past Embarcadero shipped a new release every year but during the last years they changed their habit and ship now every six months a new major release. And they have good reasons to do so which means we have to live with this fact.
The components are used in many applications so that it is impossible for many of you to move to the current version of RAD Studio without them.
In the past I maintained the components in the way that they are backward compatible. This approach has two disadvantages: On the one hand it is impossible to use new language features and on the other hand the effort to test all versions increases from release to release.
I also put my focus on Delphi only, normally there was no version for CBuilder.
This time Embarcadero’s RAD Studio Product Manager Marco Cantù asked me to change my strategy. He asked me only to support the latest version, therefore Delphi and CBuilder equally. I thought that this is a great idea and agreed.
This means that Embarcadero sponsors me to give you the best possible version of the components that support the latest version of Delphi and CBuilder and use the newest language features if necessary.
Basically the components are tested by Embarcadero but in case of issues I will keep on bug fixing.
Thanks to Embarcadero, particularly Marco, for this great step forward. Porting your application to the latest version of RAD Studio will now be easy.
All components will be a fork of their original, they will ship under the same license and they will be hosted under SourceForge.
Marco and I agreed to maintain in the first step the following components, maybe we will add further in the future:
1. Orpheus (Win32 and Win64)
2. Abbrevia (Win32, Win64, MacOSX, iOS and Android)
3. Virtual Tree (Win32 and Win64)
4. SynEdit (Win32 and Win64)
5. LockBox (Win32, Win64, MacOSX, iOS and Android)
6. Async Professional (Win32)
7. PowerPDF (Win32 and Win64)
