Dimensional Data

Forwarding a set of emails to incorrect or invalid email addresses can be tedious and time-consuming. To avoid this problem you can utilize an email validation API which helps you thoroughly verify and identify the email sender’s domain and username with minimal fuss.  MailboxLayer can add powerful email address validation to your Delphi and C++ apps The MailboxLayer is a simple but solid REST API that measures email deliverability & quality. You can easily verify email addresses as they arrive into your system, and you can make sure you only send emails to real customers. The Low Code way of creating fully functional apps In this post, we will create our email validation application with FireMonkey App Low Code Wizard. With this wizard, you can create a fully functional Delphi mobile application with multiple screens using just a few easy steps.  The MailboxLayer API offers an easy to integrate option with RAD Studio The Mailboxlayer API is simple and secure and comes with easy to integrate URL structure, delivered in lightweight JSON format. Moreover, it offers: Email Provider Database  Interactive and clear documentation Secure data streams  Extended Statistics about your API usage Furthermore, you can power your validation process with a real-time SMTP checker, syntax & typos validation, and/or separate real permanent email addresses from disposable emails. How do I set up the MailboxLayer API? Head over to the MailboxLayer API website (https://mailboxlayer.com/) and sign up for the free subscription providing you basic information. After signing up, you can go to a quick start guide dashboard and your API access key will be provided. How do I request MailboxLayer API endpoints? Now you have the API access key and all we need to do is to call the base API endpoint (http://apilayer.net/api/check) with the required parameters added to the URL address. The easiest way of doing it is to utilize the REST Client library. What I liked about this API is that it is immaculately clean! In these images, you can see the sample of calling to API endpoint and with sample JSON response. After the request to the endpoint, you can get a clear and concise JSON response. Each API response consists of 10 different response objects. You can see them here on the official documentation of the API (https://mailboxlayer.com/documentation)  How do I connect my applications to the MailboxLayer API? Well, the crazy and fun part starts here! After following the steps and learning about the API endpoint now you can call the endpoint with RAD Studio Delphi or C++ Builder.  This REST endpoint calling is done by using 3 REST Client components those are TRESTClient, TRESTResponse, and TRESTRequest. The rapid way of connecting to APIs – REST Debugger REST Debugger helps to test and understand how RESTful web service works. You can easily configure, filter, enable OAuth 1.0/2.0 authentication and resource parameters. Moreover, after connecting and receiving the JSON response you can swiftly copy and paste components from the REST Debugger to your Delphi or C++ Builder solution. How do I build an app which runs on Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS and works with the MailboxLayer API? As we talked about Low Code Wizard earlier, we will utilize FireMonkey App Low Code Wizard now. Let’s just pause for a moment to speak some more about Low-Code development.  Low-Code development is a visual […]

Would you like to enhance your application with news data from thousands of international news publishers and blogs, updated as often as every single minute? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a FREE, Simple REST API for Live News & Blog Articles? 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 LowCode Wizard in addition to a REST client library to take advantage of MediaStack API and retrieve a JSON format response for worldwide news, headlines and blog articles in real-time. What can the MediaStack API do for our apps? MediaStack API offers instant access to live news data feeds, discover trends & headlines, monitor brands and access breaking news events around the world. This is possible to be done for free (up to first 500 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. Every minute, the MediaStack API interface is automatically collecting news articles from 7,500+ global news sources and blogs worldwide, parsing it and converting it into a standardized programmatic format for the purpose of ease of use. In order to ensure the highest possible level of accuracy and data consistency, each of the sources used is monitored closely and around the clock for technical or content anomalies. Additional news sources are added continuously as they become available. Our RAD Studio and Delphi applications will be able to call the API and request information based on the name of parameters you provide. How do I set up the MediaStack API? Make sure you refer to MediaStack API website (https://mediaStack.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 MediaStack API endpoints? Now all we need to do is to call the API base URL (http://api.mediaStack.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. MediaStack offers two API endpoints to choose from: News Data: Get live & historical news data News Sources: Get a list of news sources Our demo will focus on the Live News 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 MediaStack Quickstart guide (https://mediaStack.com/quickstart) // Live News Data http://api.mediastack.com/v1/news ? access_key = YOUR_ACCESS_KEY // optional parameters: & sources = cnn,bbc & categories = business,sports & countries = us,au & languages = en,-de & keywords = virus,-corona & sort = published_desc & offset = 0 & limit = 100 // Live News Data http://api.mediastack.com/v1/news ? access_key = YOUR_ACCESS_KEY   // optional parameters: & sources = cnn,bbc & categories = business,sports & countries = us,au & languages = en,–de & keywords = virus,–corona & sort […]

Embarcadero has made available the Community Edition license for the most recent 10.4 release of Delphi and C++Builder. This is a free edition for students, hobbyist and startups. As announced yesterday with the blog post Delphi & C++Builder FREE Community Editions Updated to Version 10.4.2 Are Now Available, Embarcadero has moved the free CE license of its two IDEs, Delphi and C++Builder, to the last version of the product, 10.4 Sydney. The Community Edition is a free edition for non-professional developers (read the FAQ or the EULA for more information) and anyone who wants to start using one of the two products to learn them. Being a complete product aligned to the Professional Edition of Delphi or C++Builder, it allows building applications for desktop (Windows and also macOS for Delphi) and mobile (Android and iOS). The CE edition includes both the VCL and the FMX UI libraries, but also the core RTL and database libraries, web technologies and more. If you are interested, you can download 10.4 CE and also sign up for the “summer camp” to learn more about the technology of these CE editions and other Embarcadero tools: I’ve very happy we are making the 10.4 version of Delphi and C++Builder available as a free Community Edition tools, as I’m certain a lot of people will leverage the opportunity to learn about our technology, both in terms of programming languages and libraries. If you are new to it, Delphi is a lot of fun to learn and a very powerful natively compiled language, worth having a deep look.

That was the theme of a live I watched… “And Delphi, huh???” For those who follow the evolution of the tool over the years, especially since Embarcadero, everything that has happened is very clear. But for those who are not part of this group, the question is extremely pertinent. I became an admirer It was through a live that I got to know, I immediately became an admirer of the creator of the stream André Baltieri , or simply Balta as he is called. You who do not know, and I open space here to say that I did not know, and still do not know personally, Balta has been a Microsoft MVP for 9 times in recent years, has a long journey in his development career and through his work on the Balta portal . io has trained more than 20,000 programmers who somehow consumed some of his courses. Access the original post (in Portuguese) The live was in Portuguese, with an audience of over 300 people participating online. To learn more, follow the link to the original post on my site:

The free and full-featured Community Editions of Delphi and C++Builder are designed to help you get started programming. These powerful IDEs provide all the features you need to quickly explore robust app development. When Community Edition launched it made all the features of the Professional Edition of Delphi and C++Builder free to students and hobbyists in the community: including mobile platforms, desktop database, and the full source code for the runtime libraries. Now the 10.4.2 Sydney update brings the absolutely latest features and updated platform support to Delphi & C++Builder Community Edition. There’s no better way to build powerful native applications for iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS from a single codebase than using the robust and easy-to-learn Delphi language. This makes it the ideal choice for students or anyone who just wants to get things done. C++Builder is your choice if you want to master the mysteries of the curly brace. It unlocks a huge variety of C++ standard libraries, while still giving you access to the powerful runtime libraries included in Delphi. This is a winning combination for C++ development. The Community Editions of Delphi & C++Builder are designed for students and hobbyists. If that is you, and you are new to programming, then download the free Community Edition of your choice [Delphi 10.4.2 CE or C++Builder 10.4.2 CE] and register for the free . Community Editions are available free of charge to developers, and organizations with fewer than five developers. You must have revenues less than US$5,000. They come with a one-year term license and a limited commercial license. If you aren’t sure if you qualify for the CE license then start with the Free Trial or consult the Community Edition License FAQ. Once you outgrow Community Edition then upgrade to a perpetual license with an unrestricted commercial license and choose between the Professional, Enterprise, and Architect Editions of Delphi, C++Builder, and RAD Studio.

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 […]