Borland Delphi 7 Studio review

Delphi has supported a couple of different reporting tools over the years, from ReportBuilder to QuickReports. Delphi 7 has switched to Nevrona's Rave Reports. It's a more advanced product than QuickReports and offers output to Adobe PDF, HTML, RTF or plain text. Nevrona also offers a Rave server and, crucially, has announced Rave Reports for Kylix, plugging a hole in the Kylix offering and making cross-platform projects more feasible.

Other changes in Delphi 7 include HTML editing with code completion, partial project compilation, more flexible editor options, and new dbExpress drivers for Oracle 9i, Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and MySQL. Web Services developers get a new UDDI browser for locating SOAP services in a UDDI Registry, and numerous improvements to the SOAP support.

There are now four versions of Delphi. Personal is just for fun or learning, not licensed for commercial use. Professional is the core product plus IntraWeb Page mode, Web Services, database features and Kylix for Linux. Enterprise adds dbExpress drivers for SQL Server, Oracle, DB2 and Informix, XML tools, ModelMaker and DataSnap middleware. Architect adds Bold for Delphi, a framework for model-driven applications. Ultimately, for the bundles alone, it's a worthwhile upgrade, but if you're not convinced any will be of use to you the changes in Delphi 7 alone don't justify an upgrade.

Author: Tim Anderson