Dimensional Data

Themba Sivate has been a Delphi programmer since 2012. He introduced his application (ST Audio Player Lite) at the Delphi 26th Showcase Challenge and we got to converse with him to have an insight on his Delphi expertise. Find out more about his software at ST Software When did you start using RAD Studio/Delphi and have long have you been using it? I started using RAD Studio on 2012 at University. A year later, I started to learning building applications from scratch using C++ builder installed on institution’s machines, until today. What was it like building software before you had RAD Studio/Delphi? I tried both QT Creator and visual studio before, and it was a pain and limitations too. Rad Studio will let you call Delphi code within C++. Meaning you can reuse Delphi libraries on c++, How did RAD Studio/Delphi help you create your showcase application? RAD Studio is easy to use, simplified drag and drop, simplified packaging. It help me to complete my audio player in less time. What made RAD Studio/Delphi stand out from other options? Easy to use, backwards compatibility, tons of libraries/components, simplified drag and drop, cross-platform outputs. What made you happiest about working with RAD Studio/Delphi? Less development time. Good database handling and development. Its sad that the I cant afford the license at this stage, but I’d be happy to build the list of applications I had on my mind which requires a paid version of RAD Studio. What have you been able to achieve through using RAD Studio/Delphi to create your showcase application? Debugging was pretty easy and straight forward. Most can be achieved by modifying values of the properties, without writing a line code. What are some future plans for your showcase application? I’m planning to upload it on windows store. Future releases are planned and bug fixes. Also planned to support multiple languages. Thank you, Themba! You can check out his software’s showcase entry below. Showcase

Dashboards, a graphical visualization of data, seem to be everywhere, especially in these pandemic times where daily and weekly trends take on a very personal significance. In this article we are going to look at a beautiful dashboard which you can very easily customize to suit your own needs. Visualization is the art of making the useful, beautiful. There is only so far you can get with tables of facts and figures. Sooner or later there comes a time when you will need to create a graphical visualization of your data. Pictures really do save a thousand words, but they also help your users get a grasp of the information in a more easily consumed way. Most Delphi programmers are probably familiar with the basic TChart component which has been bundled with nearly every version of Delphi. For more recent versions of RAD Studio such as Sidney, you had to tick an optional checkbox to get the TChart component to appear on your component palette. That bundled version of the TChart component is provided by Steema Software based in Spain. The dashboard we are writing about here is also produced by Steema to demonstrate the power of their Pro versions of TeeChart as well as their TeeGrid. More on that in a moment. What does the dashboard visualization look like? It’s beautiful! Where can you get the dashboard visualization? The great news is the Steema dashboard example is freely available for download from GitHub here: https://github.com/Steema/TeeChart-FireMonkey-samples/tree/master/Dashboard I used the cross-platform GitHub desktop project to download the sample directly from the repository. What components do you need? To work with Steema’s dashboard visualization example you’re going to need a copy of their Pro TeeChart component. This is NOT the same as the bundled version. In fact, if you have the bundled version installed you will need to completely uninstall it first because it will clash with the Pro version. You will also need to install Steema’s TeeGrid component too. What if I don’t have the TeeChart Pro or TeeGrid component packs? Not a problem – Steema’s website has a download for a fully functional 30-day trial of both component libraries. I used the trial versions to write this article and they worked without any problems. Go to this link to download them: https://www.steema.com/product/vcl Just make sure you uninstall the bundled version of TeeChart that came with RAD Studio FIRST because I didn’t remember and got myself into a bit of tangle. If that happens to you, uninstall both the new component packs using their uninstaller. Then go into the IDE, select “component” from the menu, then “install packages”. Now scroll down and make sure all references to the TeeChart and TeeGrid components are gone. Click on any that are there, and then “remove”. Now close the IDE and install the TeeChart Pro and TeeGrid components using their installers, and all will be well. I make these mistakes, so you don’t have to! What does the dashboard visualization do? Well, the source code reads from an included SQLite database. Almost all the data retrieval is done using LiveBindings. All the data access components use the FireDAC query components. There are a few areas in the program where the data is read and manipulated in code but overall, it’s nearly all the LiveBindings […]

RunIt Pulse mobile app provides owners and managers of retail chains with a real-time “on-the-go” dashboard and it’s made possible by the perfect partnership of Delphi coupled with developer skill.  This powerful and featured-packed app allows them to view critical, real-time metrics about their stores.  Written by Run It Systems based in New York, the app is available on just about any kind of hardware users might need including Windows, maxOS, iOS and Android. Also, Run It targets a number of different types of hardware too not only desktops and laptops but also tablets and mobile phones.  In fact, wherever Run It’s users are or whatever they are doing they can have a retail dashboard at their fingertips updated in real-time. RunIt Systems Website What sort of real-time data can RunIt Pulse display? RunIt Systems tell us the real-time RunIt Pulse allows the user to view: The latest sales statistics, broken down by store Number of receipts, voids etc. Top selling items, including on-hand and on-order Sales results by employee Sales trending graphs Google Play RunIt Pulse Apple App Store ‎RunIt Pulse on the App Store Screenshot Gallery Reduce development time and get to market faster with RAD Studio, Delphi, or C++Builder. Design. Code. Compile. Deploy.Start Free Trial   Upgrade Today    Free Delphi Community Edition   Free C++Builder Community Edition

Jarrod Davis has been using Delphi ever since Turbo Pascal 3.03. He registered his application (GameVision Toolkit) to the Delphi 26th Showcase Challenge and asked for his thoughts on using Delphi. More information of his application is on GameVision. When did you start using RAD Studio/Delphi and have long have you been using it? I have use every version starting with Turbo Pascal 3.03 back in the day through to the most recent version of Delphi What was it like building software before you had RAD Studio/Delphi? I’ve always used Object Pascal/Delphi, but in those times when I had to use a different development tool for whatever reason, I was never nearly as productive as I am using Delphi. How did RAD Studio/Delphi help you create your showcase application? I was able to take advantage of my knowledge using Delphi, source code, utilities and libraries I have accumulated over the years. What made RAD Studio/Delphi stand out from other options? Object Pascal is just a nice and expressive language for me and the Delphi IDE has all the features for rapid application development What made you happiest about working with RAD Studio/Delphi? Ease of use, rapid application development. Everything “just works.” What have you been able to achieve through using RAD Studio/Delphi to create your showcase application? Take my version 1.x and add all the features I had been planning in a impressively short period of time. What are some future plans for your showcase application? Continue to improve and add features. Thank you, Jarrod! The showcase entry for his software can be found below. Showcase

Manuel Lopez started using Delphi in 1997. He presented a showcase entry (A Fantastic Portrait Program From Craps Dice Is Made With Delphi) into the Delphi 26th Showcase Challenge and we talked to him about his Delphi mastery. More of his application Portraits With Craps on his website. When did you start using RAD Studio/Delphi and have long have you been using it? I started using Delphi from the version, which was presented in 1995 in Orlando, Florida, at the Borland conference at that time. Over time I used versions 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7, the latter being the best in my opinion. There were new versions but I did not test them. I got funding for an academic project and bought the Seattle version. Without a doubt, the development and evolution of Delphi represents an extraordinary work. Being able to program with practically the same code for Linux, Mac Os, Pc and Android makes it, in my opinion, one of the best RAD development tools. I had the opportunity to go to more than one Borland convention. There I met David I, one of Delphi’s most enthusiastic programmers. Later, I even had the opportunity to interview Anders Heilsberg, the creator of Turbo Pascal and the Delphi compiler. What was it like building software before you had RAD Studio/Delphi? The idea of visual and non-visual components makes programming much more effective. The fact of dedicating more to solving the problem that we have already using components that do the routine tasks, is without a doubt one of the most attractive things about Delphi. In addition, for years Delphi has maintained the open source philosophy and there is a lot of source code, components and tools, which can be used very easily. For my PhD thesis I developed a program that uses a series of open source components that solves a significant number of problems for the results I needed to obtain. How did RAD Studio/Delphi help you create your showcase application? Portraits using Craps is a program that creates images with dice. In May 2020, I wrote about a dice image created by cyber artist Barbara Lynn Helman. Apparently the creator put the dice according to the shade of gray that she visually found in each bit of the image. The photographs he submitted seem to indicate this. However, visually making a box made with dice like this would have been too complicated a task and probably too easy to make mistakes. I want to assume that Barbara used some program that told her which die to put in which position. This would be, in any case, the smart way to do this task. So I wrote a program that precisely generates images with dice, like the ones Miss Lynn Herman does. In fact, the program is a modified version of other software that I wrote (for a Digital Image Processing university course), which allows making images with halftones, which seeks to simulate shades of gray for printing black and white photographs (see Computer Graphics. Principles and Practice in C, James D. Foley, Andries van Dam, Steven K. Feiner, John F. Hughes, Addison-Wesley, 1995; chapter 13.1.2 Halftone Approximation). I quickly got a program that generated the final images, putting virtual dice (dice images), instead of putting real dice on a […]

I have been showing complete, industry-ready solutions built with RAD Server. For instance, the Field Services Industry template contains REST endpoints which the Field Service Admin and Field Service App connect to. It uses InterBase on the backend for its database storage.  Or the Hospitality Industry template that includes a mobile client application for collecting survey data, a back-end server to store data and administer surveys, and a web client for viewing survey data. Includes RAD Server multi-tenancy support. To easily deploy your solutions, Embarcadero Technologies provides ready-to-use installers to deploy RAD Server on Linux and Windows servers. How can I install easily RAD Server on Windows and Linux? Be sure to head over and check out the RAD Server Windows & Linux installers on the GetIt portal and download them in the IDE!

Google Cloud offers a Natural Language API which allows a developer to take unstructured text as an input and utilize Google’s machine learning capabilities to derive insight from it. They have a number of different operations that can be performed on a piece of text including syntax analysis, entity analysis, custom entity extraction, sentiment analysis, custom sentiment analysis, content classification, custom content classification, custom models, and spatial structure understanding. The Google Natural Language APIs feature multi-language support, large dataset support, and give you access to Google’s AutoML models. RAD Studio and Delphi gives you easy access to all of this Natural Language processing capability via Google’s REST API. RAD Studio includes a tool called the REST Debugger where you can configure all of your REST API settings and then export them as components into your Delphi application. This includes wiring up the incoming data automatically to an in memory database table (TFDMemTable). It literally takes only a few minutes to get up and running with Google Cloud’s powerful Natural Language API from within Delphi and RAD Studio. Additionally, the application built and the source code available at the end of this blog post uses Delphi’s cross-platform/multi-platform FireMonkey framework which supports Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, and iOS with a single codebase and single responsive UI. Let’s dive into the Google Cloud Natural Language API and how to build a desktop and mobile application utilizing it’s REST API. What can I do with the Google Cloud Natural Language API? On Google’s website the full REST reference for the Natural Language API is available. Here are the different endpoints available in the API: analyzeEntities POST /v1beta2/documents:analyzeEntities analyzeEntitySentiment POST /v1beta2/documents:analyzeEntitySentiment analyzeSentiment POST /v1beta2/documents:analyzeSentiment analyzeSyntax POST /v1beta2/documents:analyzeSyntax annotateText POST /v1beta2/documents:annotateText classifyText POST /v1beta2/documents:classifyText How can I set up the Natural Language API credentials? An API key is needed in order to use the above REST APIs. You will need to visit the following URL which will walk you through creating a project and enabled the Natural Language API on your Google Cloud account. https://cloud.google.com/natural-language/docs/quickstart-client-libraries Once you have the Natural Language API enabled on your account you can visit the Credentials page to create an API Key. https://console.cloud.google.com/apis/credentials How do I connect to the Google Cloud Natural Language API REST end point with Delphi? I built a sample application in Delphi using the REST Debugger which utilizes the analyzeEntities end point. There is also a video tutorial for using the RAD Studio REST Debugger available to automatically create the REST components and paste them into your app. The analyzeEntiries endpoint breaks down the content of the text into entities that are contained within Google’s machine learning database. Entities have their own id (called mid), a type classification (like ‘ORGANIZATION’), and contain additional meta data like a Wikipedia URL and the like to provide context to that entity. Here are the three components in Delphi that make the API call. They are the TRESTClient, TRESTRequest, and TRESTResponse. You will notice that the API URL is set on the BaseURL of TRESTClient. On the TRESTRequest component you will see that the request type is set to rmPOST, the ContentType is set to ctAPPLICATION_JSON, and that it contains one request body for the POST which is set to: You will also notice that on the TRESTResponse component the RootElement […]