Data is ubiquitous and fluid. It needs to be accessed from a variety of clients and locations. Software services are common within corporate infrastructures. A development tool needs to be able to easily leverage and take advantage of such services and data. Tiburón will provide the power, components, code, and libraries to make building applications that do just that.

By extending both the existing DataSnap architecture and the dbExpress data access framework, Tiburón will provide an expanded set of components and modules that will enable easy creation of flexible and high performance n-tier applications. Tiburón will provide the ability for even thinner clients to access methods and data on application servers and for clients and servers to easily exchange datasets. On the server side, application servers will be able to cache connections, commands, and result sets. By abstracting the concept of a dataset, servers will be able to converse with any number of different client types– native, managed, Java, JavaScript, PHP, etc. Overall, DataSnap will evolve to become a more powerful, more flexible multi-tier development solution.

Globalization is opening and expanding new markets particularly for organizations in and doing business with Asian and expanded EU markets. With the increasing opportunity for globalized business, developers are challenged to deliver applications that support internationalized data, currencies and character sets. Tiburón, as currently planned, will provide a native Unicode solution for developing applications for the world market. The Tiburon IDE, as currently planned, will be completely Unicode-based along with the VCL and build-chain, enabling complete Unicode-enabled development. Developers will be able to use Unicode strings and characters throughout the runtime library, the VCL, and their own code. Tiburón, as currently planned, will also include powerful internationalization tools so that developers can localize applications for multiple languages and encodings. A high priority is being placed on backward and forward compatibility with existing Delphi applications, data, and source code in order to streamline moving forward existing Delphi applications and components. CodeGear is also working closely with the vast 3rd party component vendor community to Unicode enable existing 3rd party VCL components.

Delphi’s Object Pascal programming language has always been a cutting-edge development language, implementing language features such as properties, methods and events, structured exception handling, or support for interfaces long before other languages. Delphi’s Object Pascal language will take even more significant steps forward in Tiburón.

Specific language enhancements planned for Tiburón include:

• Generics, including language and RTL support
• Anonymous Methods, which enable the user to define a method in the body of an expression while extending the lifetime of any captured local declarations and assign the resulting method reference to a location of method reference type."

• Continued conformance improvements to the current C++ standards
• resolving outstanding Delphi incompatibilities
• Unicode support in native C++ and VCL
• VCL adaption layer for C++ supporting RAII and iterator idioms
• C++ standard library TR1
• Prebuilt Boost Distribution
• CORBA support for TAO ORB

2. Productivity through the IDE
Developer productivity has always been a cornerstone of C++Builder. Productivity features under consideration for Tiburón include;

• Faster compiles with precompiled-header tuning
• Enhanced unit test support
• More powerful Project Manager
• Two-way LiveSource UML modeling
• C++ Class Explorer

3. Advanced support for the upcoming C++ “0X” standard
The C++ standard is evolving and C++Builder will lead the way delivering new language features, especially those that will be used within the library and the VCL itself. Features we are evaluating for Tiburon, include

• Unicode support
• rvalue references
• variadic templates
• scoped enums