RAD Studio XE8

The Connected App Platform for Windows and Beyond

Embarcadero® RAD Studio XE8 is the complete software development solution for rapidly designing, coding, and extending "connected" apps across Windows, Mac, iOS, Android and IoT. Build industrial strength and Business ready solutions incorporating multiple native client platforms, mobile extensions, smart devices like smart watches and other IoT gadgets, cloud services, Enterprise and embedded data. Remove the stress of multiple teams and multiple codebases and create fast native apps for Windows, OS X and mobile from one codebase.

Discover How RAD Studio XE8 Expands Your Business

• Multi-platform FireUI
• Extend Windows apps to mobile
• Mobilize business with EMS
• Update subscription
• Get productive
• Native Platform Controls
• Stay informed with Analytics

Dealing with Multiple UI Form Factors? Revolutionize the process with FireUI

RAD Studio XE8 and the FireUI Multi-Device Designer delivers the only true single source solution for natively compiled applications. Most vendors who support native cross-platform development require separate user interfaces to be written on each platform.

Build a common UI that works across multiple form factors of mobile phones, tablets, and desktop systems. Most mobile development solutions do not support the creation of PC apps for Windows and OS X.

RAD Studio XE8 continues to enhance the process of building great apps with FireUI! The all new Multi-Device Preview provides a design time side-by-side view comparing your apps UI over different form factors on a given platform – all in one window!

Quickly Extend VCL Windows Apps with Mobile, Cloud, and IoT

Extend your existing Windows VCL applications to mobile, gadgets and wearables by easily creating Internet or Bluetooth connections with AppTethering components. Discover and interact with the wide range of Bluetooth enabled gadgets and sensors with standard Bluetooth and Bluetooth LE. Access on device sensors, such as accelerometer, GPS, and proximity sensors with new VCL components.

Mobilize your Business with Enterprise Mobility Services (EMS)

Enterprise Mobility Services (EMS) is a new turnkey solution for today's interconnected, distributed apps, offering an easy to deploy middleware server that hosts loadable custom API and data access modules. EMS is based on open and standard technologies, including REST HTTP calls and JSON data formats, and provides major SQL database drivers along with a built-in encrypted SQL datastore. With its user management and authentication plus user and API analytics, Enterprise Mobility Services is ideal for enabling secure access from mobile and desktop apps to Enterprise Databases. EMS is a middleware solution that is stateless, restful, scalable, and secure. Open the world of connected devices to your existing Windows VCL app with EMS!

EMS has been improved with updated and new features. Push Notifications server support for iOS and Android allows developers to deliver event driven notifications to the end user's device through EMS.

Future Proof your Investment With Update Subscription

Update Subscription is getting a major update! With a new name, we're introducing many new features and additional benefits for no extra cost! Now you'll get on-going maintenance on previous versions for up to 2 years from release, every fix and update for the current release, early beta access, exclusive content and more!

Be More Productive Than Ever

Get the most productivity from any native development platform to create connected apps for multiple devices and platforms, IoT gadgets, and wearables like smart watches without having to manage separate code bases with multiple frameworks and languages.

RAD Studio XE8 adds new features that will make you more productive than ever. With the all new GetIt Package Manager you can browse, download, and integrate new components, right from the IDE!

New coding enhancements include code refactoring, live syntax checking, metrics, structural code highlighting, parenthesis matching, flow control highlighting, and code analysis. It all adds up to a more productive developer and to help better understand team productivity and code quality.

RAD Studio XE8 introduces serious productivity enhancements with over 20 features

• New! Project Statisticsprovides developers with a clear picture of team productivity with activity tracking.
• New! Clipboard Historykeeps a record of clipboard contents so developers can paste content previously copied.
• New! Multi-Paste Supportperforms the same paste operation on multiple source code lines at once.
• New! Modeless and Context-Sensitive Refactoringsupport which includes: renaming variables, classes, field and properties, inlining, introducing and splitting local variables, removing unused variables, eliminating with statements, extracting methods, adding parameters, and moving classes to a different unit (Object Pascal language only).
• New! Stack Bookmarksimproves code navigation.
• New! Parenthesis Matchingprovides a visual queue to keep code clear.
• New! Flow Control Highlightingprovides visual representation of flow jumps in code directly in the editor.
• New! Structural Highlighting
• New! Code Navigation Toolbarplaces classes and methods into a drop down box for easy in-code navigation (Object Pascal language only).
• New! Smart Keys and Smart Symbol Search(Object Pascal language only)
• New! Code Analysistracks code quality with several code statistics like length parameters, nested statements, and cyclomatic complexity (Object Pascal language only).

NEW! FireMonkey Platform Native Rendering Architecture

FireMonkey’s underlying visual control architecture has been significantly overhauled in XE8 to enable multiple presentation implementations per control called “ControlTypes” - in particular, native OS control presentations can be utilized. The new underlying architecture is MVC based and is backward compatible enabling developers to choose at design time between Styled and Platform control types on a per control* basis (*for controls that include both control types). This allows you to select whether a control will be implemented at runtime by FireMonkey’s GPU driven rendering like or implemented by the underlying operating system.

In XE8 for Universal iOS 32-bit and 64-bit apps, six key performance critical controls now have iOS native platform control types built–in, including TEdit, TListView, TMemo, TSwitch, TCalendar and TMultiView. In the future we plan to add platform control types for other operating systems and components.

Because controls with a Platform .controltype use the same underlying implementation as native SDKs like Cocoa, your FireMonkey apps will have the smooth native scrolling and performance that end-users expect yet use the same component properties, methods and events and are still cross-platform between OSes. This enables you to maintain complete cross platform fidelity across Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android and deliver the best user experience possible.

With Analytics, Know What Your Users Are Doing With Your Desktop, Mobile, and Middleware Apps

Understanding how your end-users are engaging with your app will help avoid app abandonment. AppAnalytics provides developers with a visual representation of how users are interacting with applications built with RAD Studio XE8. Custom API analytics and reporting inform the develop how deployed apps are consuming hosted RESTful APIs.

Bring your VCL Windows app to the cloud with RAD Studio XE8! Integrate cloud based services from Backend as a Service (BaaS) providers, Kinvey, Parse, and App42 with components for popular BaaS services like notifications, user management, and storage.

Award winning solution

RAD Studio is an award-winning software development solution, used by millions of developers worldwide and supported by an active community of software developers, technology partners, and component vendors.

Get Started with RAD Studio XE8 Today