Dimensional Data

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 […]

When your users are trying to access things like their health-plan information, the responsiveness of your apps can often be key. There is nothing more frustrating than clicking on a button in a mobile app and then waiting for what seems like a lifetime to get some sort of response. This is doubly important for healthcare apps like HumaSmart since your users are often attempting to obtain pertinent information to present to a healthcare provider to, for example, prove they have the necessary coverage to obtain treatment. It’s stressful enough if you’re feeling unwell – we software developers don’t want to add to that by having apps which wallow through click after click to get to what the poor user wants. That’s why the high speed and rock-solid reliable performance of Delphi applications is such a critical component of a successful mobile application. Humanitas De Venezuela Website Your app could make a real difference to people’s daily lives HumaSmart allows their users to search for an collate their healthcare information and interact with the national service provider Humanitas of Venezuela. With the Humasmart App, which is written with RAD Studio Delphi using the versatile cross-platform FireMonkey framework, users can access their health plans with Humanitas Administradora de Riesgo information and services in a quick and easy way on their cell phones and other mobile devices. What does the HumaSmart app do? According to the development notes from Humanitas the app provides: Details on family members included on the users health plan along with details of the coverage types Request your letters of endorsement and reimbursements. Quick access to Humanitas Administradora de Riesgos’ hotlines (Telephonic Medical Guidance Service, Home Medical Care and Ambulances). Consult status and details of all the user’s cases and process additional documentation or reconsiderations. Communications about the health plan, as well as health and wellness newsletters. Direct access to emergency care calls. Quick access to Humanitas’ social networks It’s an excellent integration with Humanitas’ APIs and services and a great example of what can be done with Delphi. Website HumaSmart Google Play HumaSmart Screenshot Gallery

Ronald Krause has been using Pascal Delphi ever since Turbo Pascal 3.0. His showcase entry VitaMonitoring was a fantastic addition to the Delphi 26th Showcase Challenge and we got to interview him regarding his Delphi experiences. When did you start using RAD Studio Delphi and have long have you been using it? I started with Turbo Pascal 3.0 and have been using Delphi ever since. There were ups and downs on this road, but today Delphi is in a good shape. What was it like building software before you had RAD Studio Delphi? I started using Delphi with Version 2.0. Before that was the Stone Age of software development. Just google “Real programmers don’t write Pascal” if you want to know what it was like. How did RAD Studio Delphi help you create your showcase application? The application is built with Delphi and AtoZed Intraweb. Together a perfect tool for creating web apps. What made RAD Studio Delphi stand out from other options? We have build several web apps with Delphi and the Intraweb components. The experience was good, the knowledge was there. Our apps are multi-language. We built a pretty good translation system using RTTI that is quite superior to others I have seen. And there are more goodies. What made you happiest about working with RAD Studio Delphi? The incredible speed of the compiler. Our Apps builds faster than some interpreters start up. The execution speed of the app is alike. What have you been able to achieve through using RAD Studio Delphi to create your showcase application? Compared to the given requirements our app is very flexible. So we hope it will exist quite some time before it needs to be rewritten from scratch. Its goal is to build a stock of long-term observation data for agriculture. I trust in Delphi to be around in 15 years. So the main achievement is probably a kind of sustainability. What are some future plans for your showcase application? A REST API to integrate it better into other applications. Thank you, Ronald! Check out his showcase entry through the link below.

What is Blockchain? The best way to describe blockchain is a distributed database, and it is shared across many computer in a network. Block refers to the fact that data and state are stored in sequential batches or “blocks”. Chain refers to the fact that each block cryptographically references its parent. A block’s data cannot be changed without changing all subsequent blocks, which would require the consensus of the entire network. All computer on the network are known as Node. What is Ethereum? In the Ethereum universe, there is a single, canonical computer (called the Ethereum Virtual Machine, or EVM) whose state everyone on the Ethereum network agrees on. Everyone who participates in the Ethereum network (every Ethereum node) keeps a copy of the state of this computer. Additionally, any participant can broadcast a request for this computer to perform arbitrary computation. Whenever such a request is broadcast, other participants on the network verify, validate, and carry out (“execute”) the computation. This causes a state change in the EVM, which is committed and propagated throughout the entire network. Requests for computation are called transaction requests; the record of all transactions as well as the EVM’s present state is stored in the blockchain, which in turn is stored and agreed upon by all nodes. Cryptographic mechanisms ensure that once transactions are verified as valid and added to the blockchain, they can’t be tampered with later; the same mechanisms also ensure that all transactions are signed and executed with appropriate “permissions” (no one should be able to send digital assets from Alice’s account, except for Alice herself). You can read more here  What we can do using Delphi? Ethereum and its community embrace open source. You can find community projects – client implementations, APIs, development frameworks, testing tools – in a wide variety of languages. Fortunately, Delphi already has an open source project that can be used to create decentralized applications (dapps) that take advantage of the benefits of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. Check https://github.com/svanas/delphereum Do you want sample code related to this? Please wait for my article in the second part.