Having been a regular user of Embarcadero (Borland / Codegear) compilers and application development framework (BCB / C++Builder / Rad Studio) for many years, I was excited this week to hear of Embarcadero's latest technology, FireMonkey.

Embarcadero will soon be releasing their latest in their Delphi / C++ / PHP product Line, Rad Studio XE2. This product uses FireMonkey, which allows us to port our Windows 32bit apps to Win64, as well as to Mac OSX and iPhone iOS!

Despite the popularity of Visual Studio products, I have consistently preferred Embarcadero products. Their frameworks were just more structured than Visual Studio (which I also use). But with Embarcadero's FireMonkey, it will be possible to write an application once and deploy it across 4 different platforms. And they are looking at Linux and Android as well for the future. Not only that, these are true native apps, so they will still run quickly.

Very shortly, we will be taking some of our more recent VCL apps and porting them to FireMonkey C++. Familiarity with VCL should make porting to FireMonkey quite straightforward.

We have started a FireMonkey Forum on this site, to discuss FireMonkey C++, and our progress with it. Login, ask questions, and add comments.