What is Lazarus?

Lazarus IDE is a powerful and free open source cross platform rapid application development environment. With Lazarus you can easily create native applications and deploy them to many platforms. Simply press compile, then copy a single program file to a computer, and your application is deployed. There are no dependencies. The Lazarus mantra is: write once. compile anywhere. A friendly introduction video to the Lazarus environment is located here.

Lazarus, a free open source professional development environment, is a development environment that can be used to create applications for many platforms. It provides a powerful and easy to use object oriented framework, empowering its user to create software which functions the same wherever it's compiled. Lazarus makes creating world class applications much easier than any other development toolkit. The visual controls available to software creators in Lazarus pick up the native look and feel of each platform, but their layout and function remain constant. The types of applications you can create with Lazarus are limited only by your imagination.

Lazarus combines the best aspects of modern application development into a single environment. It's powered by Free Pascal, a modern programming language with powerful and convenient language features. Using the design pattern of properties, methods, and events, the Free Pascal language provides a natural way to interact with and describe objects.

At the core of the Lazarus visual environment are components. Components are reusable neatly packaged objects encapsulating often needed functionality. You simply drop them onto the surface of your application, set their properties or events, and wire them together. You get live interaction with them while designing applications. Furthermore, Lazarus makes it easy to create and reuse your own components.

The Lazarus component library comes with hundreds of reusable components and the user community creates and shares thousands of components. Cross platform components exhibit similar behavior on all platforms. This key feature allows developers to design applications on one platform and compile them to run on other platforms.

On this page we've created a case study of Lazarus being used as a business application development tool. You can study a design review and gain understanding about inner workings of a front facing reporting multi-platform application created with Lazarus and Free Pascal. We also look at the back end team-oriented tools used to configure reporting services and provide help documentation for end users.

Use the image gallery below to get a closer look and a sense of what Lazarus and the applications you can create with it are like. To see more Lazarus examples, visit the community showcase, which hosts even more examples of applications created with Lazarus. Here are some examples of applications Lazarus created software running on various platforms.