Dimensional Data

What is Telegram Messenger? Telegram Messenger is a popular cloud instant messaging application. This application offers multiple services including instant text messaging and video calls which are end to end encrypted. Telegram also allows for secure file sharing and many other powerful features which would be hard to do independently in your own code. Telegram Messenger is famous for the level of security it offers for users. Furthermore, Telegram Messenger offers a free and open Telegram API that allows anyone to create their own messaging apps operating in the Telegram cloud. To ease the Telegram API integration,  a cross-platform library completely free is provided too. This library is known as TDLib library. Why use the Telegram cloud in your own application ? Telegram Messenger is more than an instant messaging application; it’s a real social network with the capabilities and features we’ve come to expect. For example if you need a notification feature in your application, integrating with the Telegram cloud allows you to get this feature very quickly and be in touch with all Telegram users. A brief look at TDLib library. The advantage of using the TDLib component library are : Cross platform capability (Windows,Android,iOS,MacOS,Linux) High-performance. it can be red in the documentation that each TDLib instance can manage around 20000 bots. Consistent: The TDLib checks that all incoming messages and answers are dispatched in the correct temporal order. Reliable : TDLib can work on slow and unstable internet connections. Secure: All local data are encrypted. Asynchronous : Each call to TDLib doesnt block main thread. We use OpenSSL to provide security and encryption This library has also some dependency with OpenSSL. It also needs to use the Zlib compression library. This will mean we need to download those packages and include . or link the following third party binaries from them as you can see below: tdjson.dll libcrypto-1_1.dll libssl-1_1.dll zlib1.dll The Windows version of TDLib needs Visual C++ runtime that can be found at : https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=52685 How can I develop my own Telegram client in Delphi? The TDLib libray has a lot of exposed methods and despite the detailed documentation, it’s not so easy to deal with it directly. However the components suite of ESEGECE company does a lot of the hard work for you and provides the main methods to develop your own customized Telegram client. We’ve talked before about ESEGECE on the blog. Their components have a pretty wide range of uses and are definitely worth checking out. Is there a Telegram messenger component for use in Delphi? The first step will be to download the Websockets components suite of ESEGECE here in order to use their TsgcTDLib_Telegram component. Declare a new Telegram application To be allowed to connect to the Telegram Messenger cloud, you will need an API ID and API Hash Key. To get them, you  will need to Sign up for Telegram cloud with any Telegram client. Log in to the site : https://my.telegram.org Go to API development tools and fill out the form and you will get api_id and api_hash parameters required for user authorization. Use TsgcTDLib_Telegram component Start a new VCL or FireMonkey FMX project with Delphi and drag drop the TsgcTDLib_Telegram  component. You are ready to create your own Telegram client. How does a messenger app work? As for any […]

Would you like to enhance your application with Real-Time & Historical World Weather Data information? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a API to retrieve instant, accurate weather information for any location in the world in lightweight JSON format? More importantly, do you want to do all that with the smallest possible amount of code and yet keep it easy to understand and completely maintainable? Follow along for all this and more! The Low Code way to write apps In this article we will see how fast and easy it is to use RAD Studio and Delphi to create a Firemonkey multidevice application using the RAD Studio LowCode Wizard in addition to a REST client library to take advantage of WeatherStack API and retrieve a JSON format response for Current Weather, Historical Weather, Time-Series and Forecast API Endpoints. The WeatherStack API is easy to use with RAD Studio WeatherStack API offers instant access to current weather data for millions of global locations, powered by rock-solid data sources and refreshed in real-time. This is possible to be done for free (up to first 250 calls/month; no credit card required) and much more is available at very affordable prices and scalable to the use you make with no upfront commitments. The data comes from some of the largest weather stations and weather data providers in the world, all of which are closely monitored for consistency and data accuracy around the clock. Our RAD Studio and Delphi applications will be able to call the API and request information based on the name of the city you provide. How do I set up the WeatherStack API? Make sure you refer to WeatherStack API website (https://weatherstack.com/) and and sign up for the free Plan providing only your email and some basic information (no credit card required). Once you are in the website will redirect you to a Quickstart guide dashboard and your API Access Key will be provided. The Access Key unique, personal and is required to authenticate with the API. Keep it safe! How do I call WeatherStack API endpoints? Now all we need to do is to call the API base URL (http://api.weatherstack.com/) via a HTTP POST method with no JSON request body needed and some few requested parameters added to the URL address depending on the ednpoint we choose to call. One can do that using REST Client libraries available on several programming languages. WeatherStack offers several API endpoints to choose from: Current Weather: Get current weather data. Historical Weather: Get historical weather data. Historical Time-Series: Get historical time-series weather data. Weather Forecast: Get weather forecast for up to 14 days. Location Lookup: Look up one or multiple locations. Our demo will focus on the Current Weather Endpoint but all the others follow similar logic but with different parameters passed. For a complete and detailed list of endpoints and its parameters make sure you refer to WeatherStack Quickstart guide (https://weatherstack.com/quickstart) // Current Weather API Endpoint http://api.weatherstack.com/current ? access_key = YOUR_ACCESS_KEY & query = New York // optional parameters: & units = m & language = en & callback = MY_CALLBACK // Current Weather API Endpoint a href=“http://api.weatherstack.com/current”>http://api.weatherstack.com/current ? access_key = YOUR_ACCESS_KEY & query = New York   // optional parameters: & units = m & language = en & callback = MY_CALLBACK What does the WeatherStack API […]

What is the Internet Protocol? The Internet Protocol is designed to implement a uniform system of addresses on all of the Internet-connected computers everywhere and to make it possible for packets to travel from one end of the Internet to the other. You may know it better as the “IP” in TCP/IP. There are various categories of internet protocols. These protocols are created to serve the needs of different types of data communication between different computers on the internet. Why use Python to interact with internet protocols? Python has extensive built-in modules to handle each of these communication scenarios. The methods and functions in these modules can do the simplest job of just validating a URL or also the complex job of handling the cookies and sessions. Because these models are built-in modules, no further installations are required. Read these articles, to see “How Python is Powerful for Dealing with Various Scenarios”: Delphi adds powerful GUI features and functionalities to Python In this tutorial, we’ll build Windows Apps with extensive Internet Protocols and Supports capabilities by integrating Python’s Internet Protocols and Supports libraries with Embarcadero’s Delphi, using Python4Delphi (P4D). P4D empowers Python users with Delphi’s award-winning VCL functionalities for Windows which enables us to build native Windows apps 5x faster. This integration enables us to create a modern GUI with the Windows 10 look or style and responsive controls for our Python applications. Python4Delphi also comes with an extensive range of demos, use cases, and tutorials. We’re going to cover the following… How to use http, ipaddress, smtplib, urllib, uuid, webbrowser, and wsgiref Python libraries to interact with Internet Protocols and Supports All of them would be integrated with Python4Delphi to create Windows Apps with Internet Protocols and Support capabilities. Prerequisites Before we begin to work, download and install the latest Python for your platform. Follow the Python4Delphi installation instructions mentioned here. Alternatively, you can check out the easy instructions found in the Getting Started With Python4Delphi video by Jim McKeeth. Most of the modules above require the presence of the system-dependent module socket, which is currently built-in support on most popular platforms. Getting started with Python4Delphi First, open and run our Python GUI using project Demo1 from Python4Delphi with RAD Studio. Then insert the script into the lower Memo, click the Execute button, and get the result in the upper Memo. You can find the Demo1 source on GitHub. The behind the scene details of how Delphi manages to run your Python code in this amazing Python GUI can be found at this link. Open Demo01.dproj. 1. How to use the Python http package? We can use the http package for working with the HyperText Transfer Protocol. http is a collection of these modules: http.client is a low-level HTTP protocol client; for high-level URL opening use urllib.request http.server contains basic HTTP server classes based on socket server http.cookies has utilities for implementing state management with cookies http.cookiejar provides persistence of cookies http is also a module that defines a number of HTTP status codes and associated messages through the http.HTTPStatus. The following is a code example of http package to learn about HTTP Statuses (run this inside the lower Memo of Python4Delphi Demo01 GUI): from http import HTTPStatus print(HTTPStatus.OK) print(HTTPStatus.OK == 200) print(HTTPStatus.OK.value) print(HTTPStatus.OK.phrase) print(HTTPStatus.OK.description) print(list(HTTPStatus)) from http import […]

Embarcadero’s users understand the scalability and stability of C++ and Delphi programming, and depend on the decades of innovation those languages bring to development. Ninety of the Fortune 100 and an active community of more than three million users worldwide have relied on Embarcadero’s award-winning products over the past 30 years. Icons by Icons8.com. © 2020 EMBARCADERO INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

We are pleased to announce that the next version of Delphi, C++Builder and RAD Studio will be version 11. This is currently in the works and we plan to release it later this year. Moving to Version 11 A few years back, Embarcadero decided to match the version number of the two primary desktop operating systems we target (Windows 10 and OS X, later renamed macOS 10) with a series of RAD Studio 10.x releases: 10 “Seattle”, 10.1 “Berlin”, 10.2 “Tokyo”, 10.3 “Rio”, and 10.4 “Sydney”. In light of the recent changes in macOS versioning (currently at version 11) and Microsoft’s recent announcement of a coming Windows 11 version, we have decided to change our product numbering scheme accordingly. Windows, in particular, remains a key target for us, with the best library to build Windows client UI applications, our own VCL and we want to underline this strong connection. Therefore, the next major release of RAD Studio, Delphi and C++ Builder, originally expected to be 10.5, is going to be version 11. We expect it to be followed by minor updates with version numbers like 11.x and a future new major release called 12. RAD Studio 11 will build on the great features introduced in RAD Studio 10.4 series and will add new features and enhancements throughout the product, with particular focus to the Integrated Development Environment (or IDE), that is, the RAD Studio application itself. The Olympus Beta Program At the same time of this version number announcement, we are pleased to invite all of our RAD Studio customers with an active update subscription to the NDA beta program for Embarcadero’s Delphi, C++Builder, and RAD Studio 11, codenamed “Olympus”. Differently from the past, there are two separate beta programs, one for Premium Update Subscription customers and the second for all other Update Subscription Customers (the beta program, in fact, is reserved to customers with an active subscription). The Premium beta program includes as an extra benefit an online forum for beta-related feedback and discussion, where you can engage with product experts, product managers, and fellow beta testers. How to join for Premium Subscription Customers Premium subscription customers have received an email invite (sent to the primary contact for their subscription) and can join by adding their registration email address to a specific form included in the communication. If you haven’t received it and want to join the Premium beta, you can reach out to your sales representative or reseller partner. How to join for regular Subscription Customers: We have also sent an email to all subscription customers, indigent them to participate in the regular beta. In case you haven’t received it, please provide your name and the email address associated with your Update Subscription (the email you used to register the product) using this form by Friday, July 16, 2021. For both groups, once you’ve provided your email address, you will receive a follow-up email later in July, with a link to electronically sign the Olympus Beta NDA. After signing the NDA, you will be provided with the information needed to participate in the beta. Please note that we recommend against installing beta versions on a production machine. Join the Subscription to Join the Beta Not currently on subscription but interested in joining the Olympus beta to get a […]

The weather is hot in the northern hemisphere, so that means it is time for the annual Embarcadero sponsored Learn to Code Summer Camp! Our Summer Camps and Boot Camps have been a huge hit in previous years. This is your chance to gather online and learn from best trainers. The 2021 Summer Camp run for the week of Monday, July 26 through Friday, July 30th, 2021. That is one full week of free online training from the best trainers on the best development tools. This year we are expanding the offering: With the addition of PyScripter as a Free Tool sponsored by Embarcadero, we are now including classes on learning Python along with Delphi/Object Pascal, C++, SQL and web technologies like HTML and JavaScript. Beyond the basics of learning the languages, we plan to cover topics including: mobile development, Android, iOS, Linux server, Windows Desktop, game development, web development, databases, and more! Let the debates on if SQL and HTML are “programming languages” commence! The Learn to Code Summer Camp is all about learning to program. The content is aimed at people with little to no previous programming experience, or maybe someone who wants to pick up a new language. If that sounds like you, then register as a student. If instead you have some experience you would like to share, then sign-up as a volunteer! Even if you don’t know what you would like to cover yet, but would like to be involved, we would love to have your help! Stay tuned to this page for more information!

InterBase is a robust, flexible and powerful database with great scaling capabilities and functionality that allows you or your clients to take data offline securely. When you first start with any database software, it can be a little intimidating. Learning about all of the different features and functionality, how to use those features, and what to do when you have developed your applications can be overwhelming. So, if you’re just starting out with InterBase or used to be an InterBase user, now is the time to check out this webinar [Stay tuned for the link to the replay!] We discussed getting started, developing with InterBase databases and applications as well as some of the things you can do to manage your InterBase instances. Hit the Ground Running Slide deck Some Q&A responses What version of InterBase is included in RAD Studio? All versions of RAD Studio have access to the Developer Edition of InterBase while Professional Edition, you have access to IBLite Enterprise or Architect editions have IBToGo. This version of IBToGo is for mobile (Android and iOS) deployments only. How is InterBase ToGo used? For a single user or can multiple users access the database? InterBase ToGo is deployed in a single user environment. The database file is distributed to individual users, who have access to the data whether they use a mobile device or a desktop application. What are some of the advantages of ToGo over SQLite I’m not a Delphi developer, can I still download the IBConsole/InterBase Developer edition? Yes, you can get the InterBase Developer Edition download from our website. What resources are available for InterBase 2020? While there are currently no books available on InterBase 2020, we have our InterBase DocWiki that provide detailed information and sample code for working with InterBase.