Dimensional Data

Low code app development is increasingly popular today, and for good reason: it speaks to the demand for software paired with the difficulty of creating it. In many ways, Delphi led the low code revolution: RAD, where you build software by connecting components in a visual designer, is low code. The key with many low code solutions is extensibility: low code which cannot be extended to a traditionally coded app has a hard upper limit of functionality. If you’re a technology adviser, you do not want to recommend something which will limit your client or company. The best development solutions that target low code provide an avenue to grow and extend. In this too, Delphi excels. Until recently in Delphi you still had to create a new project and create the forms or screens yourself – no matter how little code you may have to write to get powerful functionality when you did. This is something we’ve now addressed with an addon to 10.4.2. In GetIt for 10.4.2 and later is a Low Code App Wizard for FireMonkey, our technology for cross-platform applications. Once installed, the New Items dialog lets you run a wizard which will create a Delphi FireMonkey app for you. It is a fully functional cross-platform application, which already contains basic functionality that every mobile app will need — you can run and use the app as is — and hooks to build more, plus demonstrates application development best practices with a very clean extensible design to add more screens with low code, plus a set of tests to ensure your app remains high quality as you customise it. Basic setup: Choose your app’s name, where to save it, and if you want a database. Choose your app’s screens. If you selected to add a database on the previous page, you can also add a Data screen Two screenshots of the Low Code Wizard The app that Delphi builds for you is configurable through the wizard, but you can choose any set of the following: User accounts: sign up, sign in, and a profile screen, with hooks for your own authentication Settings screen (where you can change the app theme (light or dark), plus some example settings you can reuse or extend) Contacts screen Terms of Use, About, and Privacy policy screens, easily configurable for your own data A database layer: using Interbase, store data in your app An example new screen you can use as a template or example for adding new functionality In other words, it generates the framework of an already working, useful application which you can extend using Delphi’s RAD (or low code) visual application design. The generated wizard, showing the hamburger menu The Settings screen, here showing the Theme setting plus some other example working settings Two screenshots of the generated low code app, here running on Windows (great for quick development, since you don’t need to deploy to a device or emulator to test.) Install the Low Code App Wizard through GetIt today, and use Delphi, one of the most productive development environments, providing you rapid development through visual design yet remaining fully extensible as your business needs grow. And join us on Thursday 10th June for a webinar demonstrating the low code wizard and how to quickly build powerful apps […]

In the recent Data ETL focused TCoffeeAndCode episode there was some excellent discussion around the use of FireDAC to extract and manipulate data in various ways. The replay, in case you missed it, the replay video is linked below. Data ETL done the easy way – thanks to a tweet! We also – among many other things – talked about the benefits of LiveBindings. Literally ten minutes before we were due to start the webinar I came across a Tweet from newly-minted Embarcadero MVP David Cornelius where he mentioned that he had been experimenting with RAD Studio’s LiveBindings. I’ve been using Delphi’s LiveBindings more and more lately and think they’re more useful than many people give them credit. I’ve started an open-source library of CustomFormat methods on GitHub: https://t.co/yUds77hYIQ. I’d be interested to hear what people think. — David Cornelius (@delphidave) May 26, 2021 Well, that was perfectly-timed! David goes on in his blog post to describe a little about LiveBindings and his personal journey where he went, not unlike myself, from a feeling of lukewarm complacency toward them to an appreciation of the finer points of their use. LiveBindings are more powerful than they appear When I first heard of LiveBindings they seemed, to me, to be some kind of variation on the old datasource / datafield kind of relationship found in older versions of Delphi and the venerable Visual Basic. They looked like we should link the controls on the screen to a field (or fields) of a database table, albeit with a prettier graphical relationship editor. Once you start to scratch the surface of LiveBindings, if you’re anything like me, LiveBindings will start to gradually reveal themselves and you’ll find there is a LOT more power going on than simple point-this-field to this-control kind of relationships. Linking controls to classes and internal code data structures is one of those Programmer Super Power RAD Studio features I keep telling people is the reason why a fairly lazy coder like myself can actually be scarily productive. It’s not me, it’s RAD Studio and, in my case at least, Delphi. Data ETL with LiveBinding Expressions There are some other great articles around which describe LiveBindings from initial beginnings through to more advanced topics: But David Cornelius embraced the idea of LiveBindings and went a little further! How to extend LiveBindings with custom binding expressions David has produced a set of code, available on GitHub, which adds some custom expressions in the LiveBindings editor. The repository contains a set of units that can be included in your apps which then enhance the available LiveBinding custom expressions to include things like automatically calculating the years since the date contained in the database field (or record or class – it’s a LiveBinding, don’t forget). LiveBindings Custom Expression Here’s a few lines of example code from David’s repo: function MakeMinutesSinceMethod: IInvokable; begin Result := MakeInvokable(function(Args: TArray): IValue var InputDate: TDateTime; RoundDigits: Integer; MinutesSince: Double; begin CheckArgs(Args, InputDate, RoundDigits); MinutesSince := RoundTo(TTimeSpan.Subtract(Now, InputDate).TotalMinutes, RoundDigits); Result := TValueWrapper.Create(MinutesSince); end); end; function MakeMinutesSinceMethod: IInvokable; begin   Result := MakeInvokable(function(Args: TArray<IValue>): IValue       var         InputDate: TDateTime;         RoundDigits: Integer;         MinutesSince: Double;       begin         CheckArgs(Args, InputDate, RoundDigits);         MinutesSince := RoundTo(TTimeSpan.Subtract(Now, InputDate).TotalMinutes, RoundDigits);           Result := TValueWrapper.Create(MinutesSince);       end); end; That code means you can add a LiveBinding custom expression MinutesSince(MyDateTimeDBField, 2) to output the […]

Pietro Ruvolo has been programming ever since 1988. He has a showcase entry (D.Fence) at the Delphi 26th Showcase Challenge and we talked to him about his programming journey over the years. Check out his website on D.Fence. When did you start using RAD Studio Delphi and how long have you been using it? I started programming in 1988 at the time of MS Dos, dBase III, and Clipper. Then at the release of Delphi, I switched to OOP programming and since then I have followed the evolution of the product. I started converting my old programs in Delphi for 26 years. I created my first software company in Rome, Italy dedicated to the development under the “new” MS Windows. What was it like building software before you had RAD Studio Delphi? It was the time of MS Dos and procedural programming, where programs generated sources of infinite size and where debugging, with languages like Clipper, Fortran, basic was a real nightmare. I started to learn OOP and Delphi RAD allowed me to create more and more lean and easily maintainable programs, as well as to create classes of objects reusable between projects, gaining a lot in development time. With the advent of Firemonkey there was a further leap in quality, introducing the possibility to maintain the same code for different platforms (macOS, Windows, Android, iOS and Linux) expanding my market to a new type of user. How did RAD Studio Delphi help you create your showcase application? In 2015, I used Delphi to create a distributed risk management platform for a client (using REST Technology). Two years later I moved to MALTA to continue the development and maintenance of the platform of that client. This activity lasted until December 2020 when I opened my own software company in Malta and started again to create products in RAD Studio. The first product we decided to develop was dictated by the pandemic situation in which we found ourselves and it is D-Fence, a product for social distancing and contact tracing. Being composed of a software platform and having to interact with the BLE sectors mounted on wearables, and with APP of different operating systems, Delphi and Firemonkey were the best and most effective solution for the realization of the entire software suite. What made RAD Studio Delphi stand out from other options? As mentioned before, the use of Firemonkey made possible the realization of this project in a short time and without the need to have different teams of programmers for each operating system, ensuring cross-platform development. The server platform uses REST technology, the apps use native compiler for IOS and ANDROID and access to the wristbands is via Bluetooth Low Energy. Finally, it is very important to maintain a single version of the source code so that any changes made becomes automatically available on all platforms. What made you happiest about working with RAD Studio Delphi? Surely the ease of reusing already used source codes is one of the most pleasant aspects of Delphi together with a powerful debugging engine that helps to develop important software in a limited time. I am also happy to have been able to reopen in Malta my original activity as a software developer. What have you been able to achieve through using RAD Studio […]

In early 2015, HTTP/2 was introduced as the new standard by IESG. This standard makes your application faster, simpler, and more robust. In this article we take you through the differences between HTTP/1 and HTTP/2, the benefits and some key terms. Why should I use HTTP/2? Converting from using HTTP/1 to HTTP/2 brings the following benefits: HTTP/2 reduces latency by enabling full request and response multiplexing. Efficient compression of HTTP header fields. Support for request prioritization. Multiple concurrent exchanges on the same connections. An unsolicited push of representations from servers to clients. What is SPDY? SPDY was an experimental protocol, developed at Google and announced in mid-2009. The primary goal with SPDY was to try to reduce the load latency of web pages by addressing some of the well-known performance limitations of HTTP/1.1. Since 2012 the new experimental protocol was supported by the Chrome, Firefox, and Opera web browsers. A rapidly growing number of sites, both large and small, were deploying SPDY within their infrastructure. In effect, SPDY was on track to become a de facto standard through growing industry adoption. After a lot of discussion within the working group, the SPDY specification was adopted as a starting point for the new HTTP/2 protocol. If you want to read more about this click here for the full story  What are the key differences between HTTP/1.x and HTTP/2? The most significant changes between HTTP/1.x and HTTP/2 are : There is a new binary framing layer which dictates how the HTTP messages are encapsulated and transferred between the client and server. The HTTP semantics, such as verbs, methods, and headers, are unaffected, but the way they are encoded while in transit is different. Unlike the newline delimited plaintext HTTP/1.x protocol, all HTTP/2 communication is split into smaller messages and frames, each of which is encoded in binary format. All communication is performed over a single TCP connection. For the official “RFC” document describing HTTP/2 you can go to the following link: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7540#section-4 What are the performance differences between HTTP/1.x and HTTP/2? The really great thing about Delphi is we can already use the latest technology so that server applications with the HTTP/2 protocol can be implemented by developers. One of the Embarcadero Technology Partners, namely ESEGECE, has created a HTTP server component which implements the HTTP/2 protocol. Let’s compare the performance difference between the HTTP/1 and HTTP/2 using ESEGECE’s components. You can download a trial version here: https://www.esegece.com/websockets/download Here’s a video taking you through the demo: As you can see HTTP/2 has a speed of at least 50% more than HTTP/1.x RAD Studio Delphi gets your applications from idea to reality with maximum speed and efficiency. Why not try it for yourself today?

WebSockets are gaining more and more strength with the implementation in most browsers, including for mobile devices. This article introduces briefly, the concept of WebSockets, and creates a chat app using a websockets component for Delphi, by Delphi component provider Esegece. What are Websockets? The WebSockets protocol allows the creation of a client-server communication channel with bidirectional transmission where both sides (client and server) can transmit data simultaneously. WebSockets came to fill the shortcomings of the HTTP protocol for this purpose, which by the way, is unidirectional (transmission occurs only from one end to the other). The most common uses for WebSockets are, among other things: home brokers (where quotes are updated all the time), social network feeds, chat apps, collaborative tools, and even multi-player games What are the differences between HTTP and WebSockets? WebSockets are a great choice if there is a need for a connection to remain open for a long time for constant data exchange. In summary, the benefits over HTTP are Low Latency, Persistent Connection and Full-Duplex (bidirectional transition). A WebSockets Delphi component To create our chat app we will use the WebSockets component. Here we are using the eSeGeCe Delphi WebSocket component. You can check its benefits here. Also, you can check some implementations here and the documentation here. To start the work, you need to download the eSeGeCe Delphi WebSocket Components and the Indy Components. These two and a video of how to install them, you can check here. How to create a WebSockets Delphi client for a chat application Let’s start with the client-side. After installing the components, get a TsgcWebSocketClient component along with two TEdit a TMemo, and a TButton. The two TEdit controls will be used as name and message fields. The TMemo control will be the field that displays all messages. In the TsgcWebSocketClient properties, you need to change just the host and port. Add ‘localhost’ to the host and 5416 to the port. Looking at the code, there are two main parts. The connection and the messages. For connection and disconnection, you can add the following in the OnShow and OnClose methods of the form: procedure TFrmClient.FormShow(Sender: TObject); begin sgcWsClient.Active := True; end; procedure TFrmClient.FormClose(Sender: TObject; var Action: TCloseAction); begin sgcWsClient.Active := False; end; procedure TFrmClient.FormShow(Sender: TObject); begin   sgcWsClient.Active := True; end;   procedure TFrmClient.FormClose(Sender: TObject; var Action: TCloseAction); begin   sgcWsClient.Active := False; end; To receive a message is very simple. The OnMessage event of the TsgcWebSocketClient, already comes with the text sended by the server. You just need to get it and put on the TMemo component: procedure TFrmClient.sgcWsClientMessage(Connection: TsgcWSConnection; const Text: string); begin mmLog.Lines.Add(Text); end; procedure TFrmClient.sgcWsClientMessage(Connection: TsgcWSConnection;   const Text: string); begin   mmLog.Lines.Add(Text); end; Sending a message over a WebSockets connection using Delphi To send a message is also, very simple. You can use the OnClick event of the button: sgcWsClient.WriteData(edtName.Text + ‘: ‘ + edtMessage.Text); sgcWsClient.WriteData(edtName.Text + ‘: ‘ + edtMessage.Text); Creating a WebSocket Delphi Server for a Chat Application For this WebSocket Delphi Server Example, we will need the TsgcWebSocketHTTPServer component, and at least, a TMemo. In the sgcWebSocketHTTPServer properties Options, mark the HTML files. Also in Fallback/ServerSentEvents/Retry, set to 3 and set the port to 5416. Here we also have two main parts, when looking in the code: the connection, and the messages. You […]

Georgi Todorov Gerasimov has been using Delphi for many years. He has a showcase entry submission (FPS-SE) at the Delphi 26th Showcase Challenge and we got to talk to him about his great Delphi experiences throughout the years. You can purchase and download his application over at File Protect System website. When did you start using RAD Studio Delphi and have long have you been using it? We have been using RAD Studio/Delphi for years. The moment Delphi XE entered the market, we started to work on a project for post quantum encryption of sensitive to critical information, which we named File Protect System – FPS. What was it like building software before you had RAD Studio/Delphi? Before the advent of RAD Studio/Delphi we faced many problems in the development of specialized REST servers. Another serious problem that our team has faced in that time was testing the end-user applications, which were utilizing web based interface. How did RAD Studio Delphi help you create your showcase application? With the advent of RAD Studio XE7/Delphi all R&D processes passed to a qualitatively new level. The technical abilities that provided us technologies like Datasnap, Tethering, Indy, FastReport, FireMonkey, etc. allowed us to speed up development processes and to raise the efficiency and reliability of our software products. At the moment we are reorganizing our working processes in order to start working with RAD Studio 10.4 Sydney. What made RAD Studio Delphi stand out from other options? One of the main advantages of RAD/Studio Delphi is the presence of unique instruments that allow quick implementation of attractive by its nature interface solutions. Another significant advantage is the high quality of the visual components and the exceptionally good compilers. What made you happiest about working with RAD Studio Delphi? It is a pleasure to work with RAD Studio/Delphi because this is an IDE that allows the developers to get a view of the project as a whole. When we get the result, every member of our team is satisfied, and that gives us the ambition to continue our development and grow. What have you been able to achieve through using RAD Studio Delphi to create your showcase application? RAD Studio XE7/Delphi helped us to finalize successfully the first versions of the File Protect System – FPS. We were able to create application that provides the end user with the ability to protect its own files and electronic messages. Something more, the application we developed allows the user to transform every single electronic device (including mobile ones) into high performance encryption system What are some future plans for your showcase application? File Protect System will continue to evolve in the future. At the moment our team is working on the integration of server-based solutions for post quantum protection of corporate structures that are using DB systems like Oracle, MS, MySQL, and DB2. Along with this we are working on our mobile solutions and DLP (Data Loss Prevention) modules that expand the functionality of File Protect System (FPS). Something more, we are continuously evolving our integrated mail client BS Mail, which is becoming popular as a stand-alone application for critical information transfer. Thank you for taking the time to talk to us Georgi. Take a look at his entry showcase below and see what kind of […]