Dimensional Data

Hello. This article is part of a series where we speak with professional software developers, ask them what it’s like to write code for a living, and perhaps gain a few insights into the software development industry along the way. Today we have a very popular member of the Delphi and RAD Studio developer community, Serge Pilko. Serge and I have collaborated behind the scenes on a few things in the last couple of years for Embarcadero and he’s one of those truly positive people who just oozes developer talent. Serge is CEO of Embarcadero Tech Partner, Softacom, a company based in Minsk, Belarus with customers from all around the world including the United States, Denmark, Belgium, Germany, Netherlands and more than 15 others. Hi, Serge. We’ve been crossed paths as developers for several years but I think this is the first time you’ve given an interview for Embarcadero. Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your professional journey from a Delphi developer to CEO of a Delphi software development company? Hi Ian, thank you for inviting me for this interview. My name is Serge Pilko and I am the CEO of Softacom, a Delphi software development company. Remembering my youth I wouldn’t say that I fell in love with technologies. In high school,  when we were studying C ++ and Visual Basic, I hated them. I had scores from 2 to 3 in the programming. So the choice of a software developer career was made under the influence of my parents. At the university, I got quite excited with programming because I was lucky to have a great teacher comparing to high school where I was unlucky 😁. At the university I started studying Delphi 3 (at that time it was the latest Delphi version) and decided to explore it deeper. Looking ahead I should mention that later this interest in Delphi has guided me to becoming a Delphi Evangelist and the first Embarcadero MVP in Belarus. But let’s come back to the chronology of the events. During and after my graduation, I worked as a developer for around 10 years and in 2008 I decided to start a new chapter of my career. I created my own company Softacom that today unites the best Delphi experts in Belarus. Though we offer a wide range of software development services, we focus on the modernization and migration of legacy software and work with local and foreign companies of different sizes. Today, our company is an official consulting and training partner of Embarcadero and acts as a certified consulting partner of TMS Software. The Softacom Website Do you remember your first projects that inspired you to follow a career in development? I think that those short projects I had during the first 2-3 years at the university did the job. They made me think that I got excited experimenting with some student databases, text editors and, of course, a calculator. I think that every Delphi developer started with a calculator. That was in the late 90ss. It was really inspired to create a GUI app easily, when instead of a console app you can have an amazing app with a rich user interface. Btw, I have a funny story about that. We (students) were young and had an inquisitive […]

REST is a type of software architecture that was designed to ensure interoperability between different Internet computer systems. Basically the idea is that services that comply with REST architecture can more easily communicate with one another. REST stands for representational state transfer and it was proposed by computer scientist Roy Fielding’s 2000 PhD thesis, Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures, in which he introduced and described REST. What is REST and why should I learn more about it? The goal of REST is to increase performance, scalability, simplicity, modifiability, visibility, portability, and reliability. This is achieved through following REST principles such as a client–server architecture, statelessness, cacheability, use of a layered system, support for code on demand, and using a uniform interface. You can have access to the complete original Roy Fielding’s 2000 PhD thesis here: https://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm Who is Roy Fielding? Dr. Fielding was deeply involved in the web’s early development and standardization, he began working at and for the World Wide Web Consortium in 1994 and co-authored the HTTP 1.0 specification. Later he was the main author behind the HTTP 1.1 and URI specs also co-founded the Apache web server project. The name “Representational State Transfer” is intended to evoke an image of how a well-designed Web application behaves: a network of web pages (a virtual state-machine), where the user progresses through the application by selecting links (state transitions), resulting in the next page (representing the next state of the application) being transferred to the user and rendered for their use. Fielding’s approach was to make sure that the REST architectural style emphasises the scalability of interactions between components, uniform interfaces, independent deployment of components, and the creation of a layered architecture to facilitate caching components to reduce user-perceived latency, enforce security, and encapsulate legacy systems. Are there rules on how to implement REST? REST does not enforce any rule regarding how it should be implemented at lower level, it just put high level design guidelines and leaves you to think of your own implementation. What we do have is the definition of 6 architectural constraints which make any web service – a true RESTful API. Client–server: By separating the user interface concerns from the data storage concerns, we improve the portability of the user interface across multiple platforms and improve scalability by simplifying the server components. Stateless: Each request from client to server must contain all of the information necessary to understand the request, and cannot take advantage of any stored context on the server. Session state is therefore kept entirely on the client. Cacheable: Cache constraints require that the data within a response to a request be implicitly or explicitly labeled as cacheable or non-cacheable. If a response is cacheable, then a client cache is given the right to reuse that response data for later, equivalent requests. Uniform interface: By applying the software engineering principle of generality to the component interface, the overall system architecture is simplified and the visibility of interactions is improved. In order to obtain a uniform interface, multiple architectural constraints are needed to guide the behavior of components. REST is defined by four interface constraints: identification of resources; manipulation of resources through representations; self-descriptive messages; and, hypermedia as the engine of application state. Layered system: The layered system style allows […]

According to TIOBE Python has overtaken Java and is most likely to overtake C in the near future. Python is the most searched language according to PYPL Index. There are some advantages to using Python for this popularity. Here are some advantages: Python is easy to read, learn and write. Improved productivity due to its simplicity. Effectively executes the code sequentially line by line which can make it easier to debug than event-driven code. Automatically assigns the data type during execution. Free and Open-Source. Huge standard library of read-made functions and features. Code once and run on many platforms. Why is the source code of a typical Python program so short? This brevity comes about because Python has a huge standard library allowing many activities and functionality to be expressed with smaller and more succinct program statements compared to many other languages. There is a test in Github to prove this code-brevity hypothesis. It is called Raytracer benchmarks and it’s based on examples from Typescript. Python got second place with just 275 lines of code. You can check that here. https://github.com/edin/raytracer How can I run Python scripts in Delphi? It’s great if we can take the advantage of Python’s advantages in our Delphi application, combing the best of both worlds. Let’s see how we can run a Python script inside a Delphi application. The easiest way to do that is by using Python for Delphi (P4D). Python for Delphi (P4D) is an open-source project by pyscripter. You can find the source code of Python for Delphi (P4D) from this link. https://github.com/pyscripter/python4delphi You can clone the source and install components by using the packages in the packages folder. Then add the source path to the library and you are ready to go. Are there any demo applications of using Python in Delphi programs? There are many Demo applications you can run out of the box. There are two components we use often. TPythonEngine: We use this component to execute Python scripts. TPythonGUIInputOutput: We use this component to get output to a UI component (Eg: TMemo). By using those components, we can execute a Python script and get the result with just a single line of code. procedure TForm1.Button1Click(Sender: TObject); begin PythonEngine1.ExecStrings( Memo1.Lines ); end; procedure TForm1.Button1Click(Sender: TObject); begin    PythonEngine1.ExecStrings( Memo1.Lines ); end; You can run the Demo projects and get results from a Python script at runtime. Did you know you can run Python programs with Delphi? These two languages combined together make a remarkably comprehensive solution to almost any software problem you can imagine. Why not download a free trial of RAD Studio Delphi and try out the power of Delphi and Python combined today?

MyInterface is the deceptively simple yet powerful client application for the industry-leading LightFactory system from New Zealand developer Dream Solutions Limited. The MyInterface app, which is written using the excellent cross-platform features of the RAD Studio Delphi Firemonkey FMX framework, runs on iOS and Android devices. Dream Solutions say, “This app connects to LightFactory or NEO systems and displays the interfaces build using the Mobile Interface Builder. When started the app will show a list of available interfaces that are being served by the system. Using this tool, you can click and drag buttons, sliders, images, text and switches onto a custom mobile form. You can save as many layouts as you want that are then served to the mobile device from LightFactory. Open the MyInterface app on your iOS or Android device and a list of available layouts is shown. When selected the layout you created will show and can be used to control your LightFactory system.” The Lightfactory Website Dream Solutions have a number of other apps in the Android Play and Apple App Stores. We’ve written about one or two of them before here: https://blogs.embarcadero.com/lframote-a-gorgeous-light-remote-android-mobile-app-integration/ Thanks to Dream Solutions for choosing the power of RAD Studio to make their solutions available. App Website MyInterface Apple Store MyInterface Google Play MyInterface Screenshot Gallery

Over time, software development has experienced a major drift not just in implementation, but in terms of the mindset as well. Back in the day, the engineering teams had clear, specific, and defined roles. The individuals in the team were expected to perform their part of the duty with minimalistic involvement and participation in other fields. Now that we are living in an agile world, the engineering mindset has been revamped and every individual is regarded as a full-stack package and should have the knowledge and expertise to execute the end-to-end cycle of software development. In this article, we’ll look at some of the key points of focus for software developers as an all-in-one package, especially when it comes to desktop and native application development. How can I make a full-fledged application using third-party APIs? Nowadays, when we talk of disruption and breakthrough technologies, it is highly dependent on time investment. Disruption in technology comes with effective use and management of time. Therefore, it is useless to recreate the wheel and engineer things from scratch that are already available in the form of open-source projects, SDKs, toolkits, packages, and libraries. When it comes to desktop or native ecosystems, we know that desktop apps are powerful execution tools that can natively run on your local machine to provide holistic application navigation and utilization experiences. With the advancement of modern web technologies, the desktop application development paradigm also experienced a major drift in terms of implementation. Technologies such as JavaScript and Python have inspired the hybrid implementation of desktop apps. Delphi is by far one of the most popular choices for native desktop application development. To develop a full-fledged application, you can easily integrate third-party APIs in your Delphi code and create exciting desktop applications as an all-in-one developer. For instance, you need to create an application that involves some modules related to maps. For this problem statement, you already have Google Maps APIs readily available. You can simply utilize these ready-to-use Google Maps APIs and map them according to your use case. Similarly, there are tons of other APIs, libraries, and SDKs for different use cases that you can use and integrate without starting the development process of these modules from scratch. Leveraging APIs such as those from API Layer among others is the smart way to use other people’s hard work to inject that kind of capable broad-strength modernity into your apps. Supercharged developers employ smart techniques to reach their targets – and there’s nothing smarter than standing on the shoulders of giants who have already done the hard work for you. What is an easy way to develop an end-to-end artificial intelligence-based application? Undoubtedly, artificial intelligence is at a boom right now and there’s every sign that this is a trend which is very much here to stay. There are tons of applications and use cases where AI has proved beneficial. From the technology and development perspective as well, researchers and engineers are actively working on producing dynamic and scalable frameworks that facilitate the development of AI applications. As the AI offerings improve and new techniques are refined many of the things we previously only thought possible in science fiction or would require vast computing resources are becoming available to regular developers at extremely affordable pricing plans and with easy […]