Dimensional Data

IF C++ and C++Builder are part of your development repertoire (and even if they aren’t), we invite you to enjoy our top 10 webinars around both, plus a bonus video with a rather influential figure in the history of C++ (scroll to the bottom to find out who it is).         Why C++Builder? C++ has consistently dominated “Top Programming Languages” lists worldwide this year. With such a strong demand, C++ developers are well-positioned to experience a good problem: too much work. Join presenter and C++Builder Product Manager, David Millington, to explore the features and functionality that set C++Builder apart by helping C++ developers worldwide build stunning apps faster. Additionally, get an exclusive sneak peek into the powerful updates coming soon to C++Builder. Watch Webinar           Installing C++Builder 10.4.2 CE – Summer Camp 2021 Installation of and introduction to C++Builder 10.4.2 CE Part of the Learn to Code Summer Camp 2021 Watch Webinar           Migrating and Modernizing C++ Projects Learn more about Embarcadero Technologies products at https://embarcadero.com Try the latest version of C++Builder for FREE Watch Webinar           Migrating your C++Builder Projects to Unicode, with Al Mannarino This session focuses on helping you migrate your legacy C++Builder apps to Unicode. CodeRage XII, Session 1. Migrating your C++ Builder Projects to Unicode, by Al Mannarino. Watch Webinar           Rapid C++ Development, with Rob Swindell – C++Builder GUI Development Rapid C++ Development, featuring Embarcadero MVP Rob Swindell.Chapter 8: Comparing GUI Development Part 2 – C++Builder VCL Watch Webinar           Quick C++Builder CRUD with FireDAC and InterBase A C++Builder multi-device FireMonkey application connecting to InterBase using FireDAC and displaying data in a TGrid using LiveBindings with simple create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) functionality. Watch Webinar           Using C++ Builder to Extend the Reach of Delphi – with David Millington Many people know you can mix C++ and Delphi in one app. But not everyone knows how, or even why you might do it. But there are lots of reasons – faster app performance for critical code, using the vast number of open source C or C++ libraries, even just the options a different language approach can give you to solving a programming problem. Join this talk to learn what C++Builder can offer to your Delphi app, and how you can easily make use of it from what feels like native Delphi code. Watch Webinar            Catch Leaks in Delphi and C++ Builder [On-Demand] How to find leaks in RAD Studio 10.4 Sydney, Delphi and C++Builder Watch Webinar           Python for C++ Developers with David I. & Kiriakos Vlahos – Webinar Replay David I. has a fantastic blog post on using Python4Delphi with C++Builder. This was inspired by our previous webinars on the topic. and is the result of his collaboration with Kiriakos (AKA PyScripter), the maintainer of Python4Delphi, who also made some changes in the library to work better with C++Builder. By popular request, David and Kiriakos have also agreed to run a Python for C++ developers webinar where you can learn to leverage Python from your favorite C++ developer tools. Watch Webinar           LLDB […]

TL;DR: Make a cool demo using Skia4Delphi and Delphi 11.1 Alexandria, post it on GitHub, be the envy of all your friends, and maybe win a prize! We all know Delphi is the best tool when it comes to making amazing GUI applications. Use Skia4Delphi to take it to the next level in this contest. Skia is a super powerful, high performance, open source, cross platform 2D graphics library. Thanks to Skia4Delphi you have full access to Skia’s amazing features. Combine that with Delphi 11.1 Alexandria and you can create amazingly beautiful applications on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android, all with the same code base. Skia4Delphi works with VCL and FMX. With FMX, you can switch to Skia as your rendering engine to improve the performance of your FireMonkey application, and unlock smoother animations with a single line of code. uses System.StartUpCopy, FMX.Forms, Skia.FMX, Unit1 in ‘Unit1.pas’ {Form1}; {$R *.res} begin GlobalUseSkia := True; Application.Initialize; … uses   System.StartUpCopy,   FMX.Forms,   Skia.FMX,   Unit1 in ‘Unit1.pas’ {Form1};   {$R *.res}   begin   GlobalUseSkia := True;   Application.Initialize;   … Review the webinar, install Skia4Delphi, and impress the world with your creative genius! To explore the amazing potential of Skia4Delphi in your applications we are hosting a contest. The requirements are straightforward. Install Skia4Delphi – it is available via GetIt or on GitHub. Use Delphi 11.1 Alexandria to create or update a VCL or FMX application using Skia4Delphi. Record a short video demonstrating your application in action.  Post it on YouTube, Vimeo, or other video hosting platform. Capture a few screenshots of your beautiful user interface. Post your code on GitHub.  Include the images and a link to your video in the readme. Include an overview of your project, details on how to build it, a description of what it does, why’s it cool, and how Skia4Delphi makes it amazing in the readme.md!  Use the topic tags: Delphi, Skia, Skia4Delphi, and others (FMX, VCL, Android, etc.) as appropriate. Include links to this blog post, Skia4Delphi, and Delphi’s home page. Share your entry on social media, tagging Embarcadero on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Fill out the official entry form. Stay tuned to this post and our blog for updates and more details. Prizes Grand Prize is an Apple M1 Mac Mini so you can take advantage of the great new support for Apple Silicon in Delphi 11 Alexandria.  We will feature some of the entries we like best in blog posts and social media. Other prizes may be added depending on the number of entries received. Rules You are free to use any other 3rd party libraries, components, etc., but don’t include that code on GitHub. Make sure you include links and details on where to get them in your description. Feel free to use external graphical resources to make your user interface look great. If your project is complicated to build then be sure to include a pre-built binary as a release.  Skia4Delphi doesn’t officially support C++Builder yet, but you are welcome to use C++Builder in this contest if you want to make it work. Yes, you need to post your code, but you can use any license you want. We recommend MIT or BSD, but the choice is yours. The video doesn’t need to be anything fancy, just show off your application in action. […]

Are you considering developing a mobile application? Your thoughts immediately turn to native app development. Still, before you decide, it is critical to understand that native apps are designed for something like a specific platform, such as iOS or Android, with a different codebase. Cross-platform apps, on the other hand, can target multiple platforms with a single codebase. Here in this brief article, you will learn about how to save money on cross-platform development frameworks. Because of the numerous advantages of having apps which can work on multiple devices – both desktop and mobile, developers worldwide embrace cross-platform app development. Today, there’s a great choice of frameworks to allow developers to create apps for multiple platforms using shared code to reduce the amount of additional work needed to address the differences the devices may have. In this article we explore what we mean by the term cross platform development and how we go about creating apps that can work for our users no matter what their choice of target whether it be desktop or mobile. What is cross-platform development? Software that can run on multiple devices and operating systems can be an example of a cross-platform application. Moreover, as a developer, you can define cross-platform apps by building a cross-platform app out of the same source code without changing so much on the core.  For instance, Delphi provides a cross-platform development ecosystem with its set of tools and libraries. The FireMonkey framework is the core tool for creating cross-platform and native applications using the same code. by Adding FMXLinux you can deploy to Linux powered platforms and also create Web Apps FireMonkey framework is one of the leading visual frameworks for creating cross-platform apps. Its architecture lets you create high-performance and secure applications.  Screenshot of a Game built with Delphi – RAD Studio Do you really need to use a cross-platform development framework? Not all cross-platform development tools provide you with the best experience when creating it or a great user experience for the users. Because cross-platform applications utilize layers of abstraction to make the thing work and sometimes you might not get the true native app feeling. For instance, apps built with hybrid technology or web technologies do not provide security over your product. Furthermore, there may be a problem when accessing hardware functionalities.  Nevertheless, Delphi, with its promising FireMonkey framework, is the solution for all. With FireMonkey visual framework and Delphi IDE, you can design GUI apps in no time and build/deploy them to Windows, macOS, Android, iOS and Linux devices quickly. Moreover, you can access any device or the operating system feature with built-in helper functions. Microsoft also has a new technology called MAUI, which is similar to FireMonkey’s architecture. However, it is still in preview, and as you can see, FireMonkey has been in active development for more than a decade and is the most stable cross-platform visual framework. Create Multi-Device Native Application using a Single Code Base Are cross-platform frameworks the future of app development? This is no secret that most companies, primarily startups, choose cross-platform development frameworks to target several markets easily. That’s why we may say that these cross-platform frameworks are in demand, and over the years, it has shown that cross-platform app development can help reduce cost and engineering time dramatically. We can […]

Did you know it’s easy to make use of some truly excellent Python libraries to super-charge your Delphi app development on Windows? Adding Python to your toolbox of Delphi code can enhance your app development, bringing in new capabilities which help you provide innovative and powerful solutions to your app’s users, which combine the best of Python with the supreme low-code and unparalleled power of native Windows development you get with Delphi. Are you looking for how to build a GUI for a powerful AI library? You can build a state-of-the-art deep learning solution with fastai on Delphi. This post will show you how to build a Delphi GUI app, dedicated to the fastai library. Watch this video by Jim McKeeth, as a comprehensive introduction about why you can love both Delphi and Python at the same time:   What is the fastai library? fastai is a deep learning library that provides practitioners with high-level components that can quickly and easily provide state-of-the-art results in standard deep learning domains and provides researchers with low-level components that can be mixed and matched to build new approaches. It aims to do both things without substantial compromises in ease of use, flexibility, or performance. fastai includes: A new type dispatch system for Python along with a semantic type hierarchy for tensors A GPU-optimized computer vision library that can be extended in pure Python An optimizer which refactors out the common functionality of modern optimizers into two basic pieces, allowing optimization algorithms to be implemented in 4–5 lines of code A novel 2-way callback system that can access any part of the data, model, or optimizer and change it at any point during training A new data block API And much more… And the best of it is, fastai is organized around two main design goals: to be approachable and rapidly productive, while also being deeply hackable and configurable. fastai is built on top of a hierarchy of lower-level APIs which provide composable building blocks. This way, a user wanting to rewrite part of the high-level API or add particular behavior to suit their needs does not have to learn how to use the lowest level. Hierarchy of fastai APIs.   How do I install the fastai Library? You can easily install fastai with pip: Or, if you are using Anaconda Python distribution, you can use this command to avoid complexities and conflicts between required libraries: conda install -c fastai -c pytorch -c anaconda -c conda-forge fastai gh anaconda conda install –c fastai –c pytorch –c anaconda –c conda–forge fastai gh anaconda   How do I build a Delphi GUI for the fastai library? The following is the user interface structure for our project: User interface structure for our fastai4D project. Here is the list of Components used in the fastai4D demo app: TPythonEngine TPythonModule TPythonType TPythonVersions TPythonGUIInputOutput TForm TMemo TOpenDialog TSaveDialog TSplitter TImage TPanel TLabel TComboBox TButton Navigate to the UnitFastai4D.pas, and add the following line to the FormCreate, to load our basic fastaiApp.py: Memo1.Lines.LoadFromFile(ExtractFilePath(ParamStr(0)) + ‘fastaiApp.py’); Memo1.Lines.LoadFromFile(ExtractFilePath(ParamStr(0)) + ‘fastaiApp.py’); You can seamlessly load the fastai app python file inside the UnitFastai4D.pas file. And make sure that the fastaiApp.py is in the same directory as our Fastai4D.exe or inside your Delphi project folder. You can change the “fastaiApp.py” with any fastai script you […]

TL;DR: Make a cool demo using Skia4Delphi and Delphi 11.1 Alexandria, post it on GitHub, be the envy of all your friends, and maybe win a prize! We all know Delphi is the best tool when it comes to making amazing GUI applications. Use Skia4Delphi to take it to the next level in this contest. Skia is a super powerful, high performance, open source, cross platform 2D graphics library. Thanks to Skia4Delphi you have full access to Skia’s amazing features. Combine that with Delphi 11.1 Alexandria and you can create amazingly beautiful applications on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android, all with the same code base. Skia4Delphi works with VCL and FMX. With FMX, you can switch to Skia as your rendering engine to improve the performance of your FireMonkey application, and unlock smoother animations with a single line of code. uses System.StartUpCopy, FMX.Forms, Skia.FMX, Unit1 in ‘Unit1.pas’ {Form1}; {$R *.res} begin GlobalUseSkia := True; Application.Initialize; … uses   System.StartUpCopy,   FMX.Forms,   Skia.FMX,   Unit1 in ‘Unit1.pas’ {Form1};   {$R *.res}   begin   GlobalUseSkia := True;   Application.Initialize;   … Review the webinar, install Skia4Delphi, and impress the world with your creative genius! To explore the amazing potential of Skia4Delphi in your applications we are hosting a contest. The requirements are straightforward. Install Skia4Delphi – it is available via GetIt or on GitHub. Use Delphi 11.1 Alexandria to create or update a VCL or FMX application using Skia4Delphi. Record a short video demonstrating your application in action.  Post it on YouTube, Vimeo, or other video hosting platform. Capture a few screenshots of your beautiful user interface. Post your code on GitHub.  Include the images and a link to your video in the readme. Include an overview of your project, details on how to build it, a description of what it does, why’s it cool, and how Skia4Delphi makes it amazing in the readme.md!  Use the topic tags: Delphi, Skia, Skia4Delphi, and others (FMX, VCL, Android, etc.) as appropriate. Include links to this blog post, Skia4Delphi, and Delphi’s home page. Share your entry on social media, tagging Embarcadero on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Fill out the official entry form. Stay tuned to this post and our blog for updates and more details. Prizes Grand Prize is an Apple M1 Mac Mini so you can take advantage of the great new support for Apple Silicon in Delphi 11 Alexandria.  We will feature some of the entries we like best in blog posts and social media. Other prizes may be added depending on the number of entries received. Rules You are free to use any other 3rd party libraries, components, etc., but don’t include that code on GitHub. Make sure you include links and details on where to get them in your description. Feel free to use external graphical resources to make your user interface look great. If your project is complicated to build then be sure to include a pre-built binary as a release.  Skia4Delphi doesn’t officially support C++Builder yet, but you are welcome to use C++Builder in this contest if you want to make it work. Yes, you need to post your code, but you can use any license you want. We recommend MIT or BSD, but the choice is yours. The video doesn’t need to be anything fancy, just show off your application in action. […]

Android Studio is indeed the go-to Android App Builder Software for creating Android applications with Java or Kotlin. Since applications built with Java and Kotlin provide full native app development and all the available features, it really provides long-term success. Moreover, the community around Java and Android Studio is vast, and if there are issues that arise, there is a hundred per cent guarantee you can find the solution easily. But there are some cases where the Android Studio with Java or Kotlin cannot be a solution.  Android is very likely the most popular operating systems for mobile and portable devices with the flexibility to deploy primarily any device that can handle it. It is projected to grow and dominate not in just mobile, tablets, PCs, cars, set-top boxes, smartwatches, home appliances, and more. For these reasons, learning how to create Android applications is a must, but choosing the proper Android development framework and a programming language is tricky with its app development ecosystem. For instance, you can see an Android developer using Android Studio but also looking for other options to develop apps with more productivity. I help you select the right Android app builder and the proper framework for your projects. How to compare Android app builders and Frameworks? It really depends on the company. For instance, start-ups use hybrid app development technologies mainly because they are free and open-source but, in reality, do not provide much productivity and higher security over your code. Numerous Android app development frameworks share many identical characteristics. But with their certain unique features, creating specific types of projects can be more accessible. Moreover, the app builder environment also plays a significant role. For instance, one framework can be used to create e-commerce apps which have easy to integrate solutions for third party services but lacks graphical user interface development. Or it requires you to work with XAML to design UI, which is not productive and not intuitive at all. Here are some criteria you should know to compare framework and Android app builders: Cross-platform capability Popularity and resourcefulness Easy & Fast UI Designing Choosing a cross-platform framework where you can build native but cross-platform applications with one codebase is no news in the current state of technology. But not all framework and development platforms support this power with the ideal architecture. FireMonkey framework, with its RAD Studio app development ecosystem, you can get all the modern features and environment to build any application that can run on major platforms like Android, iOS, Windows, macOS and Linux. Additionally, you can create business-oriented web applications. The best thing about the RAD Studio development environment is that you can prototype and design applications 5x faster than most other app builders. It gives you the low code app development platform and traditional software engineering ecosystem. Why should you select RAD Studio for your Android app development? First of all, I recommend you try out the Delphi Community Edition or RAD Studio trial version to build various types of applications. When you install the IDE with its framework and libraries, you get a set of sample applications. You can see how simple and fast to create different applications with the RAD Studio platform. Official support for recent updates of OSs The Delphi 11.1 release adds official support […]

Together, in previous articles here on the Embarcadero blog, we have been learning about low code or no code platforms. We learned how RAD Studio helps increase productivity with its fast time-to-market ecosystem and low code mindset. Helping you get your apps created with you only needing to write the smallest amount of code possible is what RAD Studio Delphi and C+ Builder has always been about right from the first days of their release. If you are not aware of our previous low code articles, check them out! With those, you can learn: What is low code movement Differences in low code tools The position of low code tools in the market Universal platform for building apps with low code Other unique features of RAD Studio development environment And 20 fun facts about low code platforms So, I consider you have already read the previous articles and know about the basics of low code movement. This article will show you the steps or must-dos you should follow to become an expert at the best low code app developer. Are you a Professional or a Citizen Developer? Anyone can use low code tools to build applications based on their idea, and these people are called citizen developers. Professional developers mostly create more reliable, stable and scalable platforms with their engineering knowledge. The exciting part is that, according to a Gartner survey, 66% of low code development platform users are professional developers from the IT department of the enterprise. For instance, developers who build apps with RAD Studio can prototype and design everything with 5x or 10x fast productivity and can extend the application with custom code where you can create a more functional app. I am here telling you that consider what you will do and who you want to become with these tools! For instance, if you love engineering and solving problems by writing/integrating/glueing up things, you should become a RAD Studio Developer. RAD Studio is the ecosystem for developers who love productivity and appreciate its time. RAD Studio’s GUI development environment is one of the greatest among any other development tools. Because of its hundreds of built-in visual and non-visual components, you can develop a working prototype in seconds and work on custom functionalities. Moreover, the data connectivity solutions are the best in class. How to become an expert at the best low code app builder? In order to become an expert in any area, you must be genuinely interested in the subject. To become a RAD Studio Developer, you should learn Delphi or C++ programming languages. Being an expert with RAD Studio is not about learning the whole Delphi or C++ language; it is more about correctly using the things you have. For instance, a tutorial shows how to become an experienced Delphi developer.  After completing these steps, it is better to see how the real-world RAD Studio developers are doing to solve problems. For example, several times a month, there will be workshop events where you can learn how to do things and ask questions from professional developers. Additionally, discover new open-source projects that can improve your development process. How to understand Low Code tools? Last semester while taking the System Analysis class, I learned so much about project planning and analysing the system requirements. In the […]