As you've probably heard, the latest and greatest development tool from Embarcadero has just been released, RAD Studio 12 Athens. Every time a new major version comes out, it is touted as a significant upgrade and boasts that NOW is the time to upgrade if you've been thinking about it.

RAD Server is an Extendable REST Server in a box. You install it and immediately have a REST service with authentication and customizable API calls that can be written in Delphi. We'll be using Delphi 11 Alexandria to showcase RAD Server 4.2, how to install it, how to write modules for it, and how to test and deploy it.

Homer Jones created a new Message Dialog that solves problems with the standard Delphi 2007 ones--and even the latest ones. The two main problems are: 1) they can be hidden behind other windows, and 2) they don't appear centered on the application's main form, even when Position is set to poMainFormCenter (that seems to have been fixed in later Delphi versions, but the former is still an issue). When a dialog box is hidden, the app freezes; they are modal, but the user can't respond because it's hidden.

This month we'll take a small console program written in Go, show and compare its equivalent as a Delphi console program, then write a simple Firemonkey application in Delphi based on the functionality. The concepts presented will include a brief overview of the Hugo web-building framework, the Markdown files it utilizes, the TOML file format, how using GitHub Actions can launch the web-building process on a local Linux computer, and finally an introduction to Firemonkey resulting in a simple desktop app that can run on Mac or Windows to update a personal website.

Tonight, we'll explore the Go programming language a little, comparing its structure and object-oriented features with Delphi.