Dimensional Data

We’re excited that after many months of hard development work, TMS WEB Core v2.0 is available for you!  All active registered TMS WEB Core v2.0 users get this new release free. TMS WEB Core brings improvements to the web client development experience from your Delphi IDE in many areas! pas2js compiler update & RTL update The latest version of the pas2js compiler, responsible for transpiling the Object Pascal code to JavaScript running in the browser, and updated RTL is integrated now, bringing even better Delphi compatibility New components Various new components have been added: – TWebDropDownControl, TWebEditDropDownControl: flexible control that can be used to show any other control in its dropdown part– TWebCheckListBox: VCL-like check listbox– TWebDBListControl: DB-aware Bootstrap styled list control with optional DB field template– TWebSearchEdit: edit control with embedded search and clear button– TWebEditBtn: edit control with attached button– TCountryComboBox, TWebCountryListBox,TWebCountryDropDown: various controls to show list of countries in the world to pick from, including list of countries with official country flagsTWebXLSX: Microsoft Excel XLSX file import & export component Component enhancementsThere is too much to list here in detail. Many new features have been added to existing components, the most important shown here: – Add controls checkbox/button/progressbar in TWebStringGrid, TWebTableControl cells– Add nodes with checkbox or radiobutton in TWebTreeView– Perform filtering on items in the TWebListControl– New ListSource/ListField property in TWebDBComboBox to load items from a dataset– Row selection in TWebTableControl+ many more… Framework improvementsThe underlying framework has been enhanced and extended: – TCanvas VCL compatible brush style support added,– Material icons style support– Touch & wheel events in TWebElementActionList– Multi-language support in TWebMessageDlg()+ many more… IDE integration improvements Improved interaction with web projects from the Delphi IDE:– Improved live-preview from context menu on form units in the IDE project manager– Delete entire folder from project via IDE project manager New browser APIs exposedNew web browser APIs easily accessible from your Object Pascal code:– Speech recognition component: TWebSpeechRecognition– Classes for multi-screen API use In the coming days and weeks, we’ll unveil via video more details about the new features in TMS WEB Core v2.0. Today, you can already learn about the new dropdown controls, the new country list controls and the TWebCheckListBox in the video from our chief evangelist Dr. Holger Flick: Another interesting source of information is the replay of the recently held webinar with CTO Bruno Fierens walking through all new features of TMS WEB Core v2.0: Meanwhile, our team is also hard at work to bring all new components, new features of TMS WEB Core for Delphi to TMS WEB Core for Visual Studio Code v2.0. You can expect this update also very soon! If you are interested in web client development using Delphi, also have a look at the recent series of blogs from Andrew Simard that covers how to use external JavaScript libraries easily from TMS WEB Core. In the past weeks, Andrew covered how to integrate the impressive Tabulator JavaScript control in a TMS WEB Core project. The series starts here. TMS WEB Core v2.0 couldn’t have been created without all your valuable feedback in the past months and years! We are extremely thankful for all your help steering the development. And we continue to count on you driving further future developments of TMS WEB Core! We invite experienced TMS WEB Core developers having […]

In our final outing in this miniseries about using Tabulator in your TMS WEB Core projects, we’re going to focus primarily on one area – performance.  While Tabulator in its simplest form is amazingly quick, there is a lot more to the performance equation than just Tabulator itself.  We’ll also look at one way to implement image lazy loading, potentially applicable to any TMS WEB Core project.  And we’ll even explore one way to monitor the progress of downloading data from an XData server. By the time we’re done, you should be well-equipped to build not only functional projects, but highly performant projects as well. Motivation. One of the defining characteristics of any application, whether it is a web app, a phone app or a Windows desktop app or any other app, is how much time the user spends waiting.  Waiting for the app to load.  Waiting for the app to display data.  Waiting for the app to respond to some kind of interaction. For example, clicking a button should ideally provide some kind of feedback, even if the action being triggered cannot be completed immediately.  Scrolling should also be as fast as possible.  “Buttery smooth” as one famous person in our field liked to describe it. There are plenty of statistics to be found (naturally, with varying degrees of applicability) that relate app performance to user retention.  If an app is slow, they’ll quickly move on to something else. So we owe it to our users (and ourselves!) to make things as absolutely performant as we can. There’s almost always something that can be done to make an app faster. But is it worth it? Tabulator. Just How Fast Is It? One of the first questions to address, then, is about Tabulator itself.  There are many JS grid libraries around.  Which one is fastest?  Well, we’re not the first to come up with that question.  In fact, there’s a GitHub project focused on exactly this – JavaScript Data Grid Performance Comparison. Unfortunately, the Tabulator figures are not yet included in their results, though a PR is pending. You can read more about it here, though. The news is good – the current version of Tabulator is easily among the top performers in this comparison in every respect.  So we’re already starting out strong in the performance department. While using Tabulator with all its defaults is great, one of the benefits to many of these JS grid libraries is the ability to customize what it is doing, as we’ve been seeing over these last several posts.  And sometimes, that customization can come at a cost if we’re not paying close attention.  As an example of this, in a previous outing, we made some changes to include the row count in the column header of our tables.  We implemented this using Tabulator’s own updateColumnDefinition() function, which did exactly what we wanted. However, it turns out that this function essentially drops and recreates the entire column (so it can be sure that all the column definition parameters are accounted for). When doing this with a column filled with images, this ended up being enormously expensive. And it also triggers a table refresh, which interferes with the live filtering function.  This particular issue is something that is being addressed by the Tabulator team […]