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2021 End of Year Summary

As the year is coming to a close, here is a quick look back at this year’s blog posts. There were twenty eight blog posts covering a wide variety of topics and below is a Word Cloud created from the titles of each post.

Word Cloud of all 2021 blog post titles

The most viewed blog post covered getting started with Delphi and Jenkins. The most “liked” post on Social Media was the latest one showing how to enable DEP and ASLR to reduce the attack vector of Delphi applications.

I have a few blog posts sitting in draft mode waiting to be completed and a few others as simple “one-liners” on my whiteboard. If you have a topic that you would like to see covered on this blog, please let me know. I am always interested in learning something new while I create a new post.

Embarcadero was very busy this last year and kept up the rapid pace of product development with two major and six minor releases in 2021: RAD Studio 10.4.2 with three patches and RAD Studio 11 with three patches. They also updated the 10.3 Community Edition to version 10.4.2. This year included a major online convention with DelphiCon and was the 50th anniversary of Pascal and the 26th anniversary for Delphi.

What is coming up in 2022? I am sure we are all tired of hearing about COVID-19 so I hope that topic slowly fades into oblivion with a much-more-contagious but much-less-deadly “Omicron” variant now running wild around the world. As far as Delphi’s future goes, there has been a multi-year focus on implementing major new features and then a lot of effort placed on quality improvements. I expect that trend to continue in 2022 with an ever-improving product that I believe is second-to-none for Windows development and can also satisfy many developers’ requirements for native cross-platform development using a single codebase targeting Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and Linux. 2022 could certainly be a breakout year for RAD Studio and Embarcadero. This is especially true with Microsoft putting more emphasis on native development along with major security concerns with Java (such as the recent log4j fiasco) and “dependency hell” found in other languages due to vulnerabilities inherent in the massive jungle of external packages like pac-resolver causing so many people to rethink the popular, but seriously “bleeding-edge” tools. Embarcadero also pointed out in a blog post earlier this year why Delphi is better than Electron for desktop and cross-platform applications. There is really not much available that can actually challenge the power of Delphi for using a single code-base that can support multiple target platforms from Windows XP to Android 11. From my vantage point, Delphi should be “King of the Hill” in development tools. Perhaps the world will catch up with me (and Delphi) some day… 😉

I hope to see you online in 2022! May your Delphi programs run without error, your systems never need to be rebooted, and your data remain safe and secure!