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In our previous articles about Blockchain, we have explored and learned a lot about the whole Blockchain infrastructure, cryptocurrencies, how to integrate Blockchain APIs into Delphi applications, non-fungible tokens, and more. Is Blockchain’s only application cryptocurrency? Blockchain and cryptocurrency are outstanding together. But they also work brilliantly on their own. Every industry can use the underlying distributed ledgers to build reliable systems. Is everything public in Blockchain? Bitcoin is a public ledger that tracks how much was sent from one address to the next. On a public Blockchain, transactions are visible. However, identity is decoupled from the trades. Here you can learn about the expectations and reality of Blockchain. Are Blockchains inefficient? To some point, it is valid depending on the structure of the Blockchain. For instance, Permissioned Blockchain is more cost-effective and energy-efficient. But Blockchains leverage a proof-of-work mechanism, usually permissionless networks mining cryptocurrency. Does Blockchain have very limited areas of application? Blockchain has many applications beyond cryptocurrency or token. For instance, Ethereum is a decentralized blockchain platform with more functionalities than you think. Ethereum offers a highly adaptable platform to construct decentralized applications using the native Solidity scripting language and Ethereum VM. It gives a rich ecosystem of developer tooling and extends in several ways. Furthermore, Ethereum is the primary home for decentralized applications like financial applications – DeFi and NFTs.  Is Blockchain the universal problem solver? Some consider Blockchain technology the best solution for most problems in our systems. But it is only applicable for its specific domain. It can give: Transparency Security & Decentralization Immutability Improved efficiency And these are the things why it attracts many people. When you come closer to this technology, you start to comprehend the accurate perception of Blockchain and its features along with its drawbacks. Over the last decade, Blockchain technology has gained a high level of triumph. If you are willing to be in this world, you should understand the essential concepts of Blockchain and other projects around it. Be sure to check out our articles to learn more about Blockchain. The more you know, the more you understand what is happening. Blockchains and cryptocurrencies can be very computationally demanding. Why not try the raw native processing power of Delphi and download a free trial today?

The broad popularity of Agile Software Development, DevOps, and continuous delivery pipelines puts more pressure on developers to build and deploy high-quality applications faster. With technology now underlying almost every aspect of daily commerce, as well as our business and private lives, fast and efficient software development is critical to maintaining developer competitiveness and success. Moreover, user experience continues to be a very dynamic and still evolving area which grows alongside, and in-step with, the technological advances in hardware. This evolution sets up users and product owners alike with the expectation that to keep ahead of the game your product’s look and feel need to keep pace with the market dynamics of functionality and visual design, all of which translates into meeting customer expectations becoming increasingly complex and demanding. This raises the question of how to scale developer productivity to become more agile and flexible. For this reason, developers are constantly incorporating tools that’ll boost productivity and efficiency. One such tool is choosing a great Windows UI toolkit which combines the best in user interface and experience design with robustness and longevity without compromising the development process or speed to market deployment.  Why is a Windows UI toolkit an important element of an app’s success? Building a user interface with modern functionalities, good usability, and the ability to present a consistent brand identity is crucial for successful professional application development. However, it can get very tedious and time-consuming without the right tools. Fortunately, with some time taken to select a great Windows UI toolkit, you can build high-quality user interfaces which deliver an outstanding user experience while also ensuring brand consistency in your mobile, desktop native, and web applications. A UI toolkit is a collection of assets containing a set of controls or components that display content or enable interaction. Whether you’re building an entirely new application or installing a new user interface, knowing what a great Windows UI toolkit is made of is an excellent foundation on which to build out your great ideas into a product that users will find not only useful but pleasant and easy to use – both of which translate into setting yourself up for commercial success. Build it quickly, build it efficiently, make it look good, make it do what the user needs, don’t be quirky, don’t be weird (adhere to familiar user interface paradigms) – this is the formula for going from a good idea to a great product. What Makes Up a Great Windows UI Toolkit? To answer this question, let’s look at a model UI toolkit – The Delphi VCL and FMX frameworks. These frameworks have dozens of powerful built-in controls included for free, ranging from various simple buttons to powerful data components like the list view grid view – all of them ready to use in your apps with a simple drag and drop. The form designer and the LiveBindings designer in RAD Studio provide a great environment to create a bold, scalable UI that looks great on all devices and screen sizes. I can’t emphasize enough how easy these are to use – just a few clicks and everything just works with little or no code. RAD Studio Delphi can fairly claim to be one of the original low code platforms where the system does most of the […]

Intellectual property security is a pillar of business sustainability. The money, time and resources invested in a project can be wiped out if the revenue-producing mechanism is not properly protected. How do Delphi and Electron protect intellectual property? The “Discovering The Best Cross-Platform Framework Through Benchmarking” whitepaper evaluates two frameworks supporting multi-platform desktop application development: Delphi and Electron. Delphi Delphi, encapsulated in the Rapid Application Development (RAD) Studio IDE, is Embarcadero Technologies’ flagship product. A proprietary version of the Object Pascal language, Delphi features graphical application development with “drag and drop” components, a WYSIWYG viewer for most mobile platforms, and robust style options including platform-standard and unique palettes that provide a fully customized look and feel. Among other features, included libraries provide GUI controls, database access managers, and direct access target platform hardware and platform operating systems. The Delphi FireMonkey (FMX) framework will compile projects to native code for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, and Linux, allowing users to develop and maintain one codebase reaching most of the market. Delphi has been available for over 25 years. Electron Electron is an open-source (MIT License), Chromium-based framework that utilizes web technologies to build desktop applications on Windows, macOS, and Linux. It is developed and maintained by GitHub, a subsidiary of Microsoft. Electron combines the Chromium-based rendering engine with a Node.js server environment. As such, the user interface for an Electron application is available via HTML5 and CSS. Generally, Electron works with most Javascript frameworks such as Angular, Vue.js, and React. The HTML5, CSS, and Javascript-based technologies found in Chromium provide a rich ecosystem of user customization familiar to any web developer. Despite its relatively young age of five years, its community boasts open source packages for database access, operating system interactions, and other common tasks. Benchmark Metrics This post is part of a series of blog posts that look more closely at each of the individual metrics used in the study, and how Delphi and Electron each fared on these metrics. The first can be found here. Download the complete whitepaper here Benchmark Category: Functionality Functionality Framework functionality was examined qualitatively through research on the business aspects of each framework ranging from initial investment through long-term maintenance of the products created. Business functionality refers to a framework’s business suitability and impact on long-term plans. Excellent functionality allows companies to easily build custom tools or extensions, develop on a platform of their choosing, protect their source code from exploitation, and have confidence that their applications will be maintainable for decades. Benchmark Metric: Intellectual Property Security Intellectual Property Security: How secure is the intellectual property of the source code in a deployable project? After businesses invest resources into their projects, they face the challenge of putting their product into the hands of the public while protecting the code and techniques that produce revenue. This qualitative metric evaluates the ability of a user to access source code via decompilation. Benchmarking Results Delphi Score: 5 (out of 5) Delphi compiles to native machine code, eliminating much of the source code structure and metadata necessary for accurate decompilation and interpretation. Decompilation using a tool like DeDe will provide some details about the UI but only assembly code for the logic/back-end. Electron Score: 1 (out of 5) Electron source code is packaged and deployed to […]

Delphi integrates with more than one language. InterBase is compatible with a dozen or more. Delphi’s recent introduction of Python libraries have enabled the two languages to work well together, but the one language that’s closest to Delphi is C++. That’s because C++Builder’s been part and parcel of the RAD Studio offering for the past 25 years. There’s a lot that can be done with C++Builder, as it opens the door to platforms and operating systems and many possibilities. Let’s look at the top 10 things you should know how to do when working with C++ and C++Builder. 1. Everything You Need For A Chat Bot C++ App, Breakpoints, Const_cast And More         In this blog post you will learn how to build a simple and modern chatbot C++ app. In another post, we will teach more details about using breakpoints. Still, if you don’t know the difference between the #include  and #include “”, we explain the difference in another great post. In C++, a cast operator is a Unary Operator which forces one data type to be converted into another data we explain how to use const_cast in C++. If you still don’t know how to download and use the C++ programming language, we explain how to download a modern C++ compiler for Windows 10 and Windows 11. Read More   2. 13 Things About C++ Software You May Not Know         C++ is an incredibly versatile, powerful, multi-purpose programming language. There is quite literally nothing that cannot be done with C++ whether it be a low-level, close to metal system application which pulls out the maximum amount of power from the computer to the most modern applications with the very latest innovations in user interface design and hardware integrations. A truly great C++ IDE includes features to allow the developer to develop even highly complex C++ software easily and with the maximum possible productivity. There is a huge treasure trove of tips, tricks, tutorials and example videos available to get you up and running with C++ too. Here’s a just a small sampling of just a few of them. Read More   3. This Is How To Develop C++ iOS Apps On Windows 11 Today         Do you know that you can develop C++ iOS Apps with Windows 11 application development tools? There is a great IDE and compiler running on Windows that supports multi-device applications for different platforms including iOS and you can develop native ARM applications like M1 CPUs too. So, your application’s program code can be recompiled so that it runs on everything from the latest Windows 11 version as well as on Apple ‘desktop’ devices such as the MacBook laptops, Mac Minis and iMacs using either Intel processors or the new M1 ‘Silicon’ CPUs. Yet that same program code can almost entirely be reused with little or no changes so it may be compiled for iOS where your apps can run on the very latest iPhone devices. Everywhere your users are, your C++ and Delphi apps can be. Read More   4. The Best C++ Compiler for Windows 10 And 11         If you are on the hunt for the best C/C++ compilers available today, this article lists the top C/C++ compilers for Windows with their features. It’s very hard […]

Extendibility means a framework can be extended as required in its own language. If a framework needs plug-ins or extensions to be written in a different language. it will force additional costs on the businesses that use it. The “Discovering The Best Cross-Platform Framework Through Benchmarking” whitepaper evaluates two frameworks supporting multi-platform desktop application development: Delphi and Electron. Delphi Delphi, encapsulated in the Rapid Application Development (RAD) Studio IDE, is Embarcadero Technologies’ flagship product. A proprietary version of the Object Pascal language, Delphi features graphical application development with “drag and drop” components, a WYSIWYG viewer for most mobile platforms, and robust style options including platform-standard and unique palettes that provide a fully customized look and feel. Among other features, included libraries provide GUI controls, database access managers, and direct access target platform hardware and platform operating systems. The Delphi FireMonkey (FMX) framework will compile projects to native code for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, and Linux, allowing users to develop and maintain one codebase reaching most of the market. Delphi has been available for over 25 years. Electron Electron is an open-source (MIT License), Chromium-based framework that utilizes web technologies to build desktop applications on Windows, macOS, and Linux. It is developed and maintained by GitHub, a subsidiary of Microsoft. Electron combines the Chromium-based rendering engine with a Node.js server environment. As such, the user interface for an Electron application is available via HTML5 and CSS. Generally, Electron works with most Javascript frameworks such as Angular, Vue.js, and React. The HTML5, CSS, and Javascript-based technologies found in Chromium provide a rich ecosystem of user customization familiar to any web developer. Despite its relatively young age of five years, its community boasts open source packages for database access, operating system interactions, and other common tasks. 26 Benchmarking Metrics This post is part of a 26-part series of blog posts that look more closely at each of the individual metrics used in the study, and how Delphi and Electron each fared on these metrics. The first can be found here. Download the complete whitepaper here Benchmark Category: Functionality Functionality Framework functionality was examined qualitatively through research on the business aspects of each framework ranging from initial investment through long-term maintenance of the products created. Business functionality refers to a framework’s business suitability and impact on long-term plans. Excellent functionality allows companies to easily build custom tools or extensions, develop on a platform of their choosing, protect their source code from exploitation, and have confidence that their applications will be maintainable for decades. Benchmark Metric 11/26: Tool Extension Tool Extension: Can the framework be extended in its own language? Frameworks that require plug-ins, extensions, or modifications to be written in a different language impose costs on businesses that require altered functionality. Rather than creating the required tool from resident knowledge, businesses may have to invest time and resources to hire an external contractor or build in-house skills in that alternate language. Benchmarking Results Delphi Score: 5 (out of 5) The RAD Studio IDE for Delphi is written in Delphi. Users can build their own extensions and tools in Delphi, eliminating the need to learn a new language and handle language boundary problems. Additionally, extensions and tools can be built in C++ via the C++Builder side of RAD Studio. Electron Score: 3 […]

Desktop applications were the primary approach to building software systems. They were all desktop applications, whether they developed utility, a small tool, or a complex architected app. Then Internet technologies started to shape the development world. Like you create an app, and everyone gets the updates automatically. But the Internet architecture infrastructure, underlying protocols, and standards like HTTP and HTML weren’t prepared for building complex systems. Despite the statistics about web and mobile applications, desktop applications rule the game for specific tasks by giving high productivity and high-speed performance that you cannot get from web and mobile apps. This explains why millions of developers build their projects with Delphi, C++, and C#. For many, their first choice is to carry out that development on Windows.  What are the reasons for developing desktop applications? These are some of the reasons for choosing desktop applications in your development: Performance is much higher More efficient multithreading apps Easy access hardware devices Many experts and a knowledge base are available to develop Windows desktop applications. Less complexity and easy to get started with Since desktop development is an enormous area, we have thousands of different tools to create applications. As expected, not all the tools are efficient, easy to use, and support the latest Windows features. This article will discuss achieving better results with better Windows software development tools. Complex UI Designing is much easier with the right tools Microsoft provides all the tools to create any application with its development libraries and frameworks. WPF, UWP for Windows desktop development, and MAUI for cross-platform app development. But to design user interfaces, you should use XAML while other tools like RAD Studio’s Delphi provides a high-speed UI development environment. You can drag and drop visual and non-visual components to the form, and you are ready to go.  Moreover, the FireMonkey cross-platform app development framework allows you to put a UI control into another UI element, giving a great experience if you need an advanced user interface. Furthermore, you can transform your whole UI/UX to another level by just applying styles. To point out, Delphi’s award-winning Visual Component Library (VCL) for Windows is the most stable framework in the Windows desktop development industry. Why? Because it has been around for more than 27 years and in active development and apps built with Delphi 20 years ago works appropriately without any dependency on modern Windows OS and devices.  Delphi’s FireMonkey (FMX) visual framework for cross-platform responsive UIs. FireMonkey is one of the advanced cross-platform development frameworks you can use to create Android, iOS, macOS, Linux, Windows, and Web applications from a single code base.  Choosing the wrong tool leads to low or impaired productivity Building graphical applications with Delphi is 5X faster than any GUI development tool in the market. You can design beautiful Desktop and Mobile application UIs with Delphi in seconds. Use the visual design menu to drag easily and drop visible and non-visual components from the palette.  Prototype faster with visual lines and enhanced margin and padding support. Use VCL Styles at design time! Prototype stylish UIs even more quickly by seeing immediately at design-time how your styled forms and controls will look when running. Better code readability directly correlates with better productivity Developers who used Delphi and its VCL or FMX frameworks know that building […]

Today AI technologies boast high popularity and demand in many spheres of our life. For example, AI is used for face identification on smartphones. On social networks, we have the possibility to add different effects on photos (AR, collages, etc.). AI tools allow users to identify different objects. They are used in video surveillance systems for identifying cars, people, animals, and all sorts of other useful capabilities. In this article, we will analyze a popular multifunctional AI service, DeepAI, and show you how easy it is to use it in your cross platform apps. With the DeepAI service, users can enjoy all the capabilities and benefits of AI via a simple and straight-forward API. One DeepAI feature allows colorizing your old black-and-white photos. It can also identify some undesirable items in the photo (like weapons, etc) and provides many other possibilities. We will show how you can easily use the DeepAI service in your Delphi FMX cross platform apps. To work with images, we suggest using the Image Colorization API. What does the DeepAI Image Colorization API do? This service for colorizing black-and-white photos is ensured by the API for work with images. For working via the API, it is necessary to send a POST request to the DeepAI server and to provide the path to the file of a black-and-white image and an API key. It is also required to use a link for connecting to the DeepAI Image Colorization API service. How do I get a DeepAI API key? For getting an API key, you have to sign up. This process is rather simple. It is necessary to click SIGNUP. Then you have to enter the user name, email, and password. After that, you will receive a link for account verification on your email. You will just have to follow the link. You need to copy the received API key and save it for further use in the FMX Delphi app. You will also have to add bank card details (card number, the date of expiration, CVV) for correct interaction with the service (the tab Billing). DeepAI offers a free trial limit of 5 dollars. How to use DeepAI in a Delphi FMX cross platform App As an example, we will send a black-and-white photo from our Delphi FMX app with the use of the POST request to the server and will get a response in the JSON format that keeps the URL link leading to the processed colorful image. In Delphi, for working with the DeepAI server, we can use some standard components TNetHttpRequest and TNetHttpClient. We have to assign the value of the current TNetHttpClient component (NetHttpClient1) to the Client field in the TNetHttpRequest component. We also need to assign the value “POST” to the MethodString field. How do I display the DeepAI image colorization results in a Delphi cross platform app? We will use the standard component TImage for showing the original black-and-white image in the FMX app. For showing the processed colorful image to a user with the help of the REST of the DeepAI service, we also have to use the standard component TImage. For showing the JSON reply from the server in the Delphi FMX app, we will use the standard component TMemo (the tab Standard). For sending the parameters via the […]

Welcome to an exciting journey of becoming a great Python developer. Python is such a compelling language to learn and master these days. It is an already prevalent tool for data science and machine learning, and current stats show it is going in the right direction. Every good developer needs good tools to perform well. Likewise, Python developers need great Python development tools to be ahead of the competition and be at the edge of creativity. Having great tools and the right mindset will save you time and effort.  Why can Python alone not be your ticket to success? First and foremost, we should acknowledge that no single language is helpful in all software problems. For example, in almost all code libraries, some code is written in assembly language to give it exceptional speed. Similarly, many python libraries are already in C, which means that we already use many languages in our code base. We have to add more languages to our portfolio to be proficient in development. Embarcadero’s Delphi can be a natural choice for all python developers. It is straightforward, easy, compliments, and adds power to your skills. What additional Python development tools can you use? If every Python developer has the same Python codebase you have, then what is your edge? To be ahead of the competition, you should provide more value to your users. To add more coding power to your Python development, you need some excellent Python complements that can quickly enhance your reach, productivity, and performance without a steep learning curve or moving to a different language altogether. Fortunately, now we have many great Python complements available. So let us examine the best of the best tools available. 1. What is Python4Delphi? Python for Delphi (P4D) is a free component suite to bridge Python and Delphi. It allows you to execute Python code in Delphi and enable Python to use Delphi code and objects. It also makes it trivial to use Python as a scripting language in Delphi. It has a plethora of demos and tutorials to get you going. Visit Embarcadero’s Python4Delphi page for more information.  2. What is Delphi4Python? Delphi for Python (D4P) is a set of free Python modules to bring Delphi’s award-winning VCL and Firemonkey(FMX) GUI building libraries to Python developers. With this tool, you have all the Delphi code available for your Python development, and you can use Delphi’s Fast and Rich GUI tools right inside Python. Read Jim McKeeth’s introductory article about Delphi4Python for more information.  How many Python development tools are available? A plethora of Python development tools is available in the market. Unfortunately, this overwhelming choice confuses new developers. Therefore, we have analyzed all available alternatives and compiled the results into 5+1 cohesive and logical categories, so you can quickly choose the best python development tool according to your needs. 1. Python’s Default IDE IDLE (Integrated Development and Learning Environment) is the default editor installed with Python. It is handy for the occasional editing of minimal scripts but lacks the professional features of a full-blown IDE. Also, sticking with it will not provide us with any edge, so we must find a better alternative.  2. IDEs for Python Learning Interactive IDEs like Jupyter Notebook and many other REPLs (Read Evaluate Print Loop) are suitable for quick […]