Is there anything RAD comparable to VCL?

If you want develop desktop apps, Delphi is a clear winner: Single executable, no runtimes, few dependencies in the case you have to deploy an app with database access, native code

As already said, Lazarus + FreePascal makes for the "free Delphi" role. I personally didn't have a good experience with it - but I heard that got better since I last tried it. (I'm talking of lazarus IDE, since FreePascal seems to be a very stable compiler and used by very serious Delphi projects for various purposes - like creating Win64 binaries, for example)

.NET, on the other side, offers some free solutions:

• On the multiplatform side, Mono + MonoDevelop

• On MS stack, the Visual Studio Express IDE.

All the choices allow you to visually create hierarchies of forms and change it in design time. Visual Form Inheritance, VFI for short, can save you a lot of time if done well.

Web things, the major players are Java (JSP and the like) and .NET (ASP.NET). Having done some webservice development in dotNet(1.1), I loved it for the simplicity. Seems Java boys have a lot more work to make things work (that was said from a Java enthusiast friend of mine) with SOAP Webservices.

Try Lazarus, Lazarus is a cross platform visual IDE for Pascal and Object Pascal developers. It is developed for and supported by the Free Pascal compiler. is available for several Linux distributions, FreeBSD, Microsoft Windows (win32/64/CE) and Mac OS X (including IPhone/IPad). The language syntax has excellent compatibility with Delphi (classes, rtti, exceptions, ansistrings, widestrings, interfaces).

for additional info check theses links

• free pascal
• Components and Code examples
• Lazarus Components

SHORT

.net, it's the closest you will get