RemObjects Software ROadmap 2008 v2

(Updated May 28, 2008)

 

As our products are progressing and evolving, we are making some changes in how we are moving forward over the course of the year, in order to better suit the needs of our users, but also the needs of our products in terms of resources involved in getting where we want them to go.

In mid-2007, we switched from a by-major-version to a subscription-based model for our products – anyone who purchased new licenses or upgrades to ‘Vinci’ and ‘Joyride’ did not only receive those new versions, but also obtained access to a full year of new releases - including major and minor updates. The releases we have planned for 2008 and beyond will build on top of this change in the licensing model, in order to deliver the best possible value to you.

 

This week, we shipped the first release of Oxygene, the next major version of our programming language for .NET and Mono. As already announced, we’ve moved this release ahead from its original fall schedule for a number of reasons, the most important one being that we have many exciting features already implemented and matured over the past half year, and simply did not want to make our users wait any longer to enjoy them.

As an indirect result of this schedule change, we also ensured that pretty much every customer who bought ‘Joyride’ since its initial release in July of last year got access to the initial Oxygene release as well.

Of course some sacrifices and triage were involved in making this schedule change, and not all of the cool features we had in the works for our fall release will be ready in May. That’s why we’re also changing the model for further development of Oxygene through 2008 and beyond: rather than bundling new features and exciting changes into major new versions roughly once a year, we will start shipping major enhancements throughout the release cycle.

Each individual release past May will feel more incremental than the major 1.5, ‘Joyride’ and Oxygene 3.0 launches have, but they will each contain major enhancements and features we previously would not have shipped in dot-releases. This means that new features – both on a language and IDE level – will be available to general users much more quickly. Exciting stuff such as our new Nullable Expressions and Futures will no longer sit in our R&D labs for half a year or more, waiting for the next major release.

Major new features that shipped in the May release of Oxygene included extensive language support for parallel computing, the above-mentioned nullable expressions and many other enhancements throughout. We’re also working on more enhancements for the language, and are keeping up-to-date with support for Silverlight 2.0 as the technology matures, and other things.

Throughout the year, areas that will receive major focus include more enhancements to parallel programming (beyond what has shipped now), integration with additional IDEs (such as MonoDevelop and Xcode) and continuous improvement of our support for Mono-specific technologies, as well as new and emerging .NET technologies coming from Microsoft.

We also have some exciting developments in the works that we cannot talk about yet, but suffice to say 2008 will remain an exciting and interesting year for Oxygene users!

 

The planned release schedule for Oxygene is as follows:

• May 2008 (current release)
• August 2008
• November 2008
• February 2009

 

 

Over the past three releases of Data Abstract and RemObjects SDK, we put a major focus – even more so than originally planned – on product quality and rounding of the current feature set. We’ve held back or deferred many new features we originally planned to ship, so that the development team could concentrate on streamlining what was there already – not just fixing bugs, although we addressed many of them, but also rounding of the user experience, dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s.

On that foundation, we are now ready to roll out many new features over the next few versions, some of them items we had planned to ship earlier and held back, some of them features we were saving for the next “version 6.0”. The first of those are making their debut in the .31 releases we shipped this week.

As with Oxygene, we’re taking an incremental approach here, and rather then holding features together for a big v6 release, we’ll be shipping them spread across the different releases planed for 2008 and 2009. As such, there will be no “version 6.0” of the RemObjects Framework products, and these changes will become part of incremental updates to ‘Vinci’.

Our 5.0.31 release shipped this week includes a number of significant enhancements that we are very excited about, including Message Envelopes, cross-platform-compatible encryption support, JSON messaging and a first experimental preview of our DA LINQ feature for .NET.

The JSON Message and JavaScript support is something we are particularly excited about, as it forms the first step of a larger effort to bring RemObjects SDK and Data Abstract to more platforms – and we consider the browser an important platform. Next on our platform agenda is full support for Silverlight 2.0 clients – a feature that unfortunately did not make the cut for .31 due to unforeseen architectural differences on the Silverlight platform, but is now scheduled for the August release.

Throughout the year, we’ll be adding more exciting stuff, such as support for DA SQL, Heterogeneous Data Tables (DA HET) and more.

 

The schedule for ‘Vinci’, including Data Abstract, RemObjects SDK and Internet Pack encompasses the following releases:

• May 2008 (current release)
• August 2008
• November 2008
• February 2009

 

 

In addition to the regular releases of ‘Vinci’ for Delphi and .NET, we are also starting R&D on project “RO|C”, an effort to provide a client-side implementation of RemObjects SDK (and eventually Data Abstract) in native C/C++/Objective-C.

We believe that where the server side is concerned, we have covered all major platforms (namely Windows x86/x64, Linux but also Mac OS X Server or Solaris) fairly well with the existing products for .NET/Mono and Delphi/FPC. On the client-side, these same products provide decent coverage of today’s desktop environments, but the availability of a thin and light-weight C/C++ implementation of the SDK will enable developers to make their services accessible to a much wider range of devices. In particular, we will be concentrating on making RO|C run iPhone OS and Android, in addition to other embedded devices. RO|C will also be usable for native desktop development on Linux, Mac OS X and of course Windows and Windows Mobile though Visual C++.

The plan for RO|C is to provide a very thin and lightweight C-based implementation of the essential RemObjects SDK client architecture - BinMessage and Message Envelopes, HTTP and TCP client channels and other core features necessary to connect to a standard RO server. On top of that, we will be providing a convenient and easy to use C++ and Objective-C API (the latter to be used mainly on Mac OS X and iPhone OS).

Depending on progress and demand, this will later be accompanied by a matching implementation of Data Abstract, built on top.

 

Since we originally announced Project RO|C in March, great progress has been made, and we're getting close to a first beta drop. We anticipate to ship a "production stable" (though not final) release of RemObjects SDK for Mac and iPhone developers, with our August release cycle.

We are looking for dedicated beta testers with either Mac or RO experience, now – please contact info@.

 

 

AnyDAC 2.0 is a very young product and has just seen its first official release, but it is already being very well received by existing and new customers alike. We see users adopting as a standalone solution, or using it in combination with Data Abstract and the DA driver we introduced in December.

Moving forward, we have many plans for AnyDAC, including providing support for additional platforms through Free Pascal (most notable Win64 and Linux) and adding drivers for additional databases such as PostgreSQL. We’re also continuously improving the library details, and are investigating options for enhanced inter-operation between AnyDAC and Data Abstract.

As one such enhancement, we are shipping a brand new DA driver with 2.0.3 that provides even better performance by eliminating the TDataSet layer and allowing Data Abstract to talk directly to the lower levels of the AnyDAC database APIs.

 

The release schedule for AnyDAC includes the following releases:

• May 2008 (current release)
• August 2008
• November 2008
• February 2009

 

Hydra has traditionally been a very stable product and never seen many radical ongoing changes, apart from its major version releases. As Hydra 3.0 evolves over the coming year, we are planning to concentrate most of our efforts on ease of use and further enhancing the interoperability between managed and unmanaged portions of your applications. We’ll also continue working on bringing the .NET side of the library on par with what’s available for Delphi, making the product more attractive for pure-.NET scenarios

 

The release schedule for Hydra is as follows:

• May 2008 (current release)
• August 2008
• November 2008
• February 2009

 

 

After careful deliberation, we have decided to phase out the DebugServer product. DebugServer is a very useful application and we rely on it internally every day, but based on the demand we have seen for it, it is not practical for us at this point to invest further resources into maintaining and advancing the product, resources that will be better spent on our other efforts. To ease the migration for DebugServer users, we will be working with the creators of similar products such as SmartInspect and CodeSite to provide a seamless migration path to their tools.

Of course the existing releases of DebugServer will continue to be available to existing customers.