Dimensional Data

In this Part 2 post, we will discuss modifying the default generated CRUD (CREATE, READ, UPDATE, DELETE) procedure implementations from the RAD Server Package Wizard, to show one possible way to implement Get, GetItem, Post, PutItem and DeleteItem REST Endpoints. In the Part 1 post, we discussed the default generated CRUD procedure implementations from the RAD Server Package Wizard. In the Part 3 post, we will discuss implementing a FireMonkey (FMX) REST client to call and interact with the RAD Server CRUD procedures. The Embarcadero RAD Server (also known as EMS – Enterprise Mobility Server) uses the industry standards of REST, and to transfer data to and from the RAD Server REST Service, JSON – JavaScript Object Notation, is typically used as the transfer encoding. Due to the Embarcadero RAD Server supporting industry standard REST and JSON, we will use Delphi’s, C++ Builder and/or RAD Studio’s REST Client Library components  (TRESTClient, TRESTRequest, and TRESTResponse ) on the client, and  System.JSON classes (TJSONArray and TJSONObject) and FireDAC on the RAD Server to implement our CRUD procedures. Also note, newer versions of RAD Server have introduced new frameworks and components that allows for greater control of the data retrieved by desktop, multi-device, web and other service-based applications that connect to your RAD Server application. For example the EMSDataSetResource Component is discussed here and other RAD Server Improvements introduced in RAD Studio 10.3.2, like the RAD Server Database Mapping Wizard, and Swagger API Documentation Improvements, are discussed here. OK, now let’s dig into the details! First, for our application we want to access and perform CRUD procedures on our Employee Table from our InterBase Employee Database. For the Employee Table, I’m using the sample InterBase Employee database, located at: localhost:C:UsersPublicDocumentsEmbarcaderoStudio21.0Samplesdataemployee.gdb Recall from the part 1 post, using the RAD Server Package Wizard, , we created a package with resource. This created for us a Data Module. A Data Module is like a special form that contains nonvisual components. We can now add FireDAC data access controls onto our Data Module to access our Employee table. On our uResourceModule unit we can add our FireDAC controls to connect to the InterBase Employee database and Query the Employee Table: The easiest way to do this is to use the IDE’s Data Explorer Tab and create a new FireDAC connection to the InterBase Employee database: Then, select the Employee Table from the Tables node. And then drag and drop the Employee Table onto the Data Module form: This will add two FireDAC components on your data module. EmployeeConnection is the FireDAC connection (FDConnection) to your InterBase Employee database, and the EmployeeTable is your FireDAC Query component (FDQuery) to perform the SQL SELECT * FROM EMPLOYEE, to return all rows from the Employee table. To test the FDQuery EmployeeTable, double-click the FDQuery EmployeeTable component. This will open the FireDAC Query Editor, and show us the SQL Command for this FDQuery EmployeeTable, like this. The SQL is SELECT * FROM EMPLOYEE Click the Execute button, to verify you get all the rows return from the Employee table: Get (READ) Procedure Recall from the part 1 post, we saw the RAD Server Package Wizard, generate a default GET (READ) procedure implementation like this: Here is how we modified the default GET procedure to use FireDAC and System.JSON Classes (TJSONArray […]

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. Hybrid app implementations have enhanced the ability of web developers to deliver desktop apps but the decreased performance and increased memory consumption are a significant downside. Since desktop apps run the application code locally on your machine, we cannot compromise on the performance and memory usage by getting rid of the native code. The future of desktop apps still lies in the native code. In this blog post, we’ll look at why native code is the future of desktop apps by comparing the performance and memory usage of Delphi with other desktop application development frameworks such as WPF .NET and Electron. Can Electron deliver an optimized solution? Visual Studio Code is an Electron app and generally performs pretty well. A developer might think that all Electron apps can achieve the same performance as Visual Studio Code but generally that is probably not the case. Microsoft has a huge task force of developers working on the project and has put a lot of effort, time, and money to optimize the VS Code application. In most cases, other companies do not have the enormous budget as giants like Microsoft and hence cannot match the optimization efforts to deliver a high-performant application using Electron. Running a a few unoptimized applications might still be fine, but we know for a fact that our systems indeed have the capacity to run more. When you choose to operate with more than a few, say five to ten, unoptimized applications then they adversely effect the system and application runtime performance. In such scenarios, RAD Studio that consists of Delphi and C++ Builder becomes an ideal choice of adoption for desktop application development. Now let’s look at the performance test results from the Embarcadero Whitepaper. According to Discovering the Best Developer Framework through Benchmarking by Embarcadero Technologies, the end-product performance, which depends on startup times and runtime memory, is one of the four aspects of effectiveness for the success of applications. The consumers judge applications based on the runtime performance and businesses choose the frameworks that have a higher performance. The specialists at Embarcadero Technologies used the development and analysis of a benchmark Windows calculator app and evaluated its performance against the Delphi, WPF, and Electron frameworks and libraries. How does Delphi Contribute to Application Performance and Startup Time? When it comes to performance and startup time of applications, according to Embarcadero’s commissioned whitepaper, frameworks that produce applications with shorter startup times facilitate good user experiences and minimize the system resources well before the application is ready to be used. Startup time is especially important when loading an executable or application over a network because network speeds can be slower than loading applications via the local hard drive. According to the experimentation done in the whitepaper, the benchmark calculator app built with Delphi gave a startup time of 0.239 seconds on average from the local files, whereas from the network files, the average time was recorded to be 0.439 seconds. The slowest startup […]

Serkan Şahinoğlu started programming since 1995. He submitted his ForPrompt Studio showcase entry at the Delphi 26th Showcase Challenge and we interviewed him to get more insight on his experiences with Delphi. Head over to the ForPrompt Studio website for the product and how to use it. When did you start using RAD Studio Delphi and how long have you been using it? Since 1995, I have been developing software in Delphi and various languages for 26 years. It has been part of many of my projects since Delphi 1. Thanks to its practicality, it helps me to finish the product in a short time. What was it like building software before you had RAD Studio Delphi? With Delphi  a simple database application could be developed in minutes without writing any code, even twenty years ago, using embedded components for database. How did RAD Studio Delphi help you create your showcase application? As I mentioned earlier RAD Studio is extremely rapid application-oriented, this is my very first mobile application developed while learning Firemonkey for the first time, this really proves RAD studio has really good features to get the work done fast. When my projects need rich interface and practicality, I mostly turn to Delphi. Several times I prepared DLL libraries and external modules with C++ and C# for custom applications and used Delphi again for the interface. What made RAD Studio Delphi stand out from other options? I usually prefer Delphi when developing software with extensive interfaces. With hundreds of visual components and features ready, I can focus on my actual work without dealing with unnecessary details. After doing projects in Visual Basic, Visual C++, C#, and other programming languages, I came to the conclusion that Delphi is a practical software development tool that can producing rapidly. Now it has reached an advanced level that can compile the same project for Windows, Linux, MacOS, iOS, Android operating systems. What made you happiest about working with RAD Studio Delphi? One of Delphi’s my favorite features is that all libraries have clear and readable source codes. By examining them, we can program them more efficiently and easily to understand what is going on behind our code up to the operating system level because it is written very practically and understandably. They also help you learn how to coding. Since the software we produce with Delphi is standalone exe file, the fact that it can be easily transported and operated without the need for additional installations speeds up our business. I can also share my practical small software with my friends as a single small exe file. The VCL library, which cleverly encapsulates the massive Windows API, its practicality in database applications, and the fact that there is no longer the need to encode heavy DirectX/OpenGL thanks to FireMonkey are all my favorite aspects of Delphi. It’s nice that the DXScene/VGScene library, which I bought a lifetime license a few years ago, soon came across as FireMonkey and evolved to its current level. What have you been able to achieve through using RAD Studio Delphi to create your showcase application? The teleprompter render engine I created in Firemonkey sends floating reading text to the laptop monitor or to screens in the TV studio via I/O cards such as Decklink and AJA. In […]

Are you familiar with the concept of OCR? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to easily convert images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text? Take a look at the two images below, with just a few lines of code we will make our Windows, Mac, Android or iOS application able to “read” those texts! Whether from a scanned document, a photo of a document or the text on signs and billboards in a landscape photo this process of extracting text from images is called Optical Character Recognition or Optical Character Reader (OCR). We can easily use Google OCR machine-learning AI in our Delphi applications The option for “Text Detection” is part of the Vision API that we can use to detect and extract information about multitple Texts in an image. For each text detected Google returns both a list of words identifed with text, bounding boxes, and textAnnotations , as well as the structural hierarchy for the OCR detected text. Google Cloud’s Vision API offers powerful pre-trained machine learning models that you can easily use on your desktop and mobile applications through REST or RPC API methods calls. Lets say you want your application to detect objects, locations, activities, animal species, products, or maybe you want not only to detect faces but also their emotions, or you may have the need to read printed or handwritten text, this and much more is possible to be done for free (up to first 1000 units/month per feature) or at very affordable prices and scalable to the use you make with no upfront commitments. How do I get my RAD Studio Delphi applications to detect text in images with an API? We can use RAD Studio and Delphi to easily setup its REST client library to take advantage of Google Cloud’s Vision API to empower our desktop and mobile applications and if the request is successful, the server returns a 200 OK HTTP status code and the response in JSON format. Our RAD Studio and Delphi applications will be able to either call the API and perform the detection on a local image file by sending the contents of the image file as a base64 encoded string in the body of the request or rather use an image file located in Google Cloud Storage or on the Web without the need to send the contents of the image file in the body of your request. How do I set up the Google Cloud Vision Logo Detection API? Make sure you refer to Google Cloud Vision API documentation in the Text Detect section (https://cloud.google.com/vision/docs/ocr) and also Document Text Detection optimized for dense text/handwriting (https://cloud.google.com/vision/docs/pdf), but in general lines this is what you need to do on Google’s side: Visit https://cloud.google.com/vision and login with your Gmail account Create or select a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) project Enable the Vision API for that project Enable the Billing for that project Create a API Key credential How do I call Google Vision API Text Detection endpoint? Now all we need to do is to call the API URL via a HTTP POST method passing the request JSON body with type TEXT_DETECTION and source as the link to the image we want to analyze. One can do that using REST Client libraries available on […]