That's not really the case. With Delphi Community edition you get support for 4 operating systems, VCL and FireMonkey, it only lacks access to Enterprise databases like Oracle and some of the multi-tier architectures. Community has a large percentage (80%+) of the features...
We wanted to do MongoDB connections, which comes with FireDAC. But that's only available in the Enterprise Edition. So we ended up rewriting TMongoWire[0] to fit our needs.
I am sure you can do most things in Delphi in the Community edition, but it's a little too late, unfortunately.
How is that "professional" if you cannot even read/write to sqlite.
https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/product-editions
"Build database apps with local/embedded connectivity" is in every edition.
The only difference is you need Enterprise or Architect to connect to "Enterprise class" databases like a remote Oracle server.
you can probably just use another Framework like (free) ZeosDB (http://zeoslib.sourceforge.net/)
or some paid ones e.g. from Devart (https://www.devart.com/dac.html)
but still, its frustrating to have to use something else for such basic functionality ...
Thanks for the correction.
Why would any company want to start developing in Delphi if the pricing/developer is suddenly going to jump to a ridiculously high number the moment they touch $5K/year limit?
But even the $5k/year limitation came in far too late.
I am very sad to see the way the Delphi community is languishing and slowly dying out.
Also have the Professional Edition and would update if only they took the macOS platform seriously. Again with this update, like the previous few, there are zero improvements for macOS.
Really regret to ever have invested any time (and money as I bought several updates) into their FireMonkey platform. It looks bad on macOS for not using native controls and it looks bad on Windows because the fonts are blurry.
With macOS only being 64 bits around the corner and openGL being declared end of life, one would expect to see some movement or improvements. Nope.
Yes, they have it on their roadmap for 2 years now. Doesn't offer a lot of confidence in that it will actually show up on time. Right now you cannot release a 32 bits app anymore in the apple app store.
So I'd argue that they are very late already. Who is going to invest time into a product you cannot release, but that -pinky promise- will be delivered before you can not even run existing 32 bits apps anymore.
Yes, Delphi has a Community Edition now (which is free), but the fact that are excluded from a large portion of the library, because you cannot afford it, is always going to alienate some people. And it is always going to feel frustrating, when other languages don't have those limitations.
My office only uses the Professional Edition, because we cannot really afford the Enterprise Edition, which means there were some problems we ended up 'inventing ourselves', because they were only available in the Enterprise Edition.
Delphi probably won't survive another decade (in my estimation), but Pascal will live on as FreePascal/Lazarus.