Dimensional Data

The Internet of Things (IoT) has become a topic of one of the TCoffee and Code sessions by Embarcadero and from there, we have learned that the possibilities for innovation are increasing every single day. Today, most of the devices we have at home are being controlled by smartphones. With the help of some windows application development, we can control devices with just a few quick taps on our phone. In this video, we will see how innovative technology can go using a smartwatch and Delphi. This video led by Sileide Campos and Victory Fernandes from the recently concluded DelphiCon 2021 will show us how they managed to program a Smartwatch to control devices using Delphi. What happens when an Android smartwatch meets Delphi? The so-called Internet of Things rapidly evolved from simple embedded systems in single-function devices like microwave ovens to the most advanced technology algorithm applied to modern devices. Every day, a new smaller, faster, and thinner technology is being introduced in the market. Smart homes are becoming increasingly popular allowing people to easily control appliances and devices like lamps, thermostats, cameras, and television by using the apps that they download on their smartphones. In this video, we will be introduced to another innovative gadget that works the same as your smartphone – the smartwatch. Using some well-known smartwatches that run on Android like TicWatch, Campos and Fernandes will demonstrate how surprisingly easy and fast it is to put apps on your smartwatch using Delphi and be able to control various devices. The video will also highlight the advantages of using WearOS to develop apps for your smartwatch as well as some near application ideas that you can develop using the system. How do I control devices using an Android smartwatch? The most interesting part of this video is the actual demonstration of how the smartwatch app works. In this video, we will get to see some actual applications and how they managed to program them using the Delphi RAD Studio. This includes an easy and no-code QR code application that can verify users if they are already vaccinated or not. The samples also include a Google Map application, Bluetooth Low Energy app, and other more complex devices that run with ESP32 microcontrollers. They also demonstrate the user’s capability to configure and change layouts according to the smartwatch model. To learn more about this interesting piece of technology and how it works with Delphi, feel free to watch the video below. Why not download a free trial of RAD Studio Delphi today and try out some of the ideas from this great video?

We have learned from the previous talks that Delphi is indeed one of the easiest programming languages that you can learn.  Although Delphi is simple by nature, it is a high-level programming language that works well for both beginners and professional developers. In this video from the recently concluded DelphiCon 2021, David Cornelius will demonstrate how to work with a low-code windows application development and build a working prototype from scratch in under 30 minutes. Everything you need to know About the Low Code principle In this session, David will take us through creating a cross-platform REST Client application from scratch to a working prototype. For him, the less code you have to write, the less code you have to debug later and we couldn’t agree more. Using a rich set of components and libraries, you can save yourself time and maintenance which lowers the cost of development and can boost your productivity at the same time. Low code is a software development approach that requires little to no coding to build applications and processes. A low-code development platform uses visual interfaces with simple logic and drag-and-drop features instead of extensive coding languages. These concepts are recognized across the industry, and some predict that by 2024, 65 percent of application development will utilize low code principles. It should be noted that this concept is not no-code as you still need to account for differences in environments or simply use or format data in unique ways. Do you know how to build a cross-platform app in Delphi with very little code? Interestingly, this session features an actual demo of how you can build a working application prototype from scratch with fewer codes to deal with. The project is a REST Client app that uses FireMonkey and works on Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS.  The demo will demonstrate how to build an app from scratch using components that can be found in Delphi. The API source for this project is Wordnik, an online dictionary. David will show us how to access a public REST API and parse JSON results into FireDAC memory tables linked with LiveBindings to fill a couple of ListView with only a few lines of hand-written code. He will also show us some tricks using some of the features of REST Debugger tools and some nifty components like the TRESTResponseDataSetAdapter that magically transforms the JSON response into a memory table.  All of which can save you a great amount of time instead of dealing with tedious tasks of extensive coding. To learn more, feel free to watch the video below.  Why not follow along with the video? Download a free trial of RAD Studio Delphi today!

Some of you are probably wondering if it is possible to develop games in Delphi. Whether you are planning to create a simple 2D or an immersive 3D game, Delphi offers a great number of options that allow you to build games from scratch. One of which is through the Castle Game engine. It is an open-source cross-platform 3D and 2D game engine supporting many asset formats and Delphi is one of its supported ide software. In this video from the recently concluded DelphiCon, Michalis Kamburelis shares with us everything we need to know about the Castle Game Engine. What are the Features of Castle Game Engine? Castle Game Engine is an open-source cross-platform 3D and 2D game engine supporting many asset formats such as glTF, X3D, Spine JSON, Collada, 3DS, MD3, and more. The engine is using modern Object Pascal and is available online via castle-engine.io. It can be used to develop a proprietary or open-source game and is also a cross-platform that supports operating systems like Windows, Linux, macOS, and mobile platforms like Android, iOS, as well as different consoles. In this video, Michalis will teach us how to build games from scratch using Castle Game Engine’s Visual Editor. Visual Editor is one of the core features of Castle Game Engine that allows you to design your user interface with 3D or 2D game elements that you can visually interact with and move around. Another important feature of Castle Engine is the ability to use any model format from the modern glTF to flexible and powerful X3D and VRML, and more. The session will also highlight various customization options that you can apply to help you achieve the kind of game you want. How to Build 3D Game using Castle Game Engine in Delphi Michalis will also walk us through the step-by-step process of building an interactive 3D game using the Castle Game Engine in Delphi. He will provide all the materials you need so you can catch up with the process. Here, you will be working with code in Delphi and utilize everything you can do with the TCastleScene class which allows you to load, process, and render scenes. In this tutorial, you will learn how to implement various scenarios including adding health bars, changing behaviors, customizing scenes, and more. If you want to learn more about Castle Game Engine and discover how you can build 3D games with Delphi, feel free to watch the video below. Why not download your own free trial of Delphi and try creating a game today?

We have seen a lot about Alister Christie from his LearnDelphi.tv website and YouTube Channel and as well as from his book “Code Faster in Delphi” that will teach us how to become productive in Delphi. Fast and efficient coding in Delphi is a great advantage in windows program development. In this session from the recently concluded DelphiCon, Alister Christie will share with us everything we need to know on how to maximize your Delphi Productivity from simple keyboard shortcuts to some techniques that are surprisingly effective. Learn how to maximize your Delphi productivity In this video, Alister will teach you some of the best practices to Code Faster in Delphi. Interestingly, one of the biggest improvements you can make to your productivity in Delphi is not related to Delphi at all, it’s how fast you can type. Being a programmer, you are going to do a lot of typing and even a small improvement in your typing speed can drastically boost how quickly you can code. Here, Alister will share some websites where you can test your typing and coding skills. He also mentioned that the type of keyboard you are using can also bring notable differences. Of course, this session will not be completed without some keyboard shortcuts that his book is known about. He will share with us some tricks about quick navigation, auto code completion, quick indentation, and more. In addition to that, Alister will share the benefits of using code templates. If you have standard bits of code that you write regularly then Code templates could be a way of producing this code programmatically. There are more tips and tricks to code faster in Delphi Another tip to maximize your Delphi productivity is the use of various tools including the multi-paste. It is a very handy tool for doing pasting and things like SQL or some strings that you want to embed in a string list. This could help you save more time. The Form Designer is another area of Delphi that has a mini productivity hack. A few simple tricks can save you a considerable amount of time in adjusting the form layout. Here, you can play around with the VCL form designer and Quick Edit Property that allows you to customize layouts, alignments, and other properties. Customizing the IDE is also an interesting trick in Delphi. Interestingly, the layout of the Delphi IDE can affect your performance. You can hide some buttons and bars that you seldom use for your project, you can rearrange panels so you can work on tools and areas more conveniently. Knowing Language Features and the Delphi Runtime Library or RTL can also help you save a considerable amount of time in coding. You should take advantage of these features both old and new to make you more productive and to save more time in coding. The session also concludes with a Q&A portion. If you want to learn more about how to become more productive in Delphi, feel free to watch the video below.

In the early days of computing most regular application programs were single threaded. They often only ran exclusively on the machine’s CPU, or they did not run at all or ran slowly as they competed for machine resources with other apps. To answer the increasing demands on personal computers and to address the rapid rise of sophisticated applications, multi-threading operating systems became available. Generally, multi-threading is a way of telling your operating system that these are the different threads (chunks of instructions) that you want to run, potentially at the same time as one another. In this video, we will dive into the details of thread performance for single and multi-threaded programming not just in windows development but also for cross platform apps targeting systems like macOS, Android, iOS and IoT. How Delphi Behaves Differently on Different Operating Systems In this session from the recently concluded DelphiCon, Olaf Monien will demonstrate how Delphi and its compiler would behave differently in machines running or powered by the different operating systems. The focus will be given to the performance and what you as a developer need to be aware of when developing multi-threaded applications on the latest generation of CPUs. With all the new hardware that are out today, this is something a developer should be concerned about. Using a Threading Test Tool, we will be able to differentiate the performances delivered by three different operating systems when running single and multiple threads. The sample machines include a Windows 10 with an Intel Core i7 CPU, a Macbook Pro with an Intel Core i9, and a Macbook Air running in an ARM-based Apple M1 processor. All machines will be tested and all performances will be compared based on their outputs (primes/second) after running Single and Multiple threads. Olaf will also walk us through the process of creating the Threading Test tool in Delphi. To learn more, feel free to watch the video below Download a free trial of RAD Studio Delphi today and follow along with the video and examples.

Are you a big Star Trek fan? If you are then this Delphi project might be a perfect fit for you. From the recently concluded DelphiCon, Embarcadero MVP Ian Barker shares a very interesting project where he attempts to recreate the LCARS user interface, a fictional computer operating system from the Star Trek franchise. Using Delphi, Ian reimagines the futuristic user interface with the help of Google’s Skia Graphics Library. In particular, he will be using the Skia4Delphi library, a simple yet powerful windows ui toolkit that comes with a great number of useful components. How to Create a Futuristic Data Dashboard Using Skia4Delphi Skia is an open-source 2D graphics library that provides common APIs that work across a variety of hardware and software platforms. It serves as the graphics engine for Google Chrome OS, Android, Flutter, Mozilla Firefox, Firefox OS, and more. This session, however, will highlight the Skia4Delphi which is a cross-platform 2D graphics API for Delphi platforms based on Google’s Skia Graphics Library. It provides a set of components that are open source and free-to-install and free-to-access. Some of the main components include the TSkLottieAnimation, TSkPaintBox, and TSkSvg In this project, Ian creates an imitation LCARS simulation using all the interesting components from the Skia4Delphi library. One of the notable advantages of using this library is that it gives you the ability to combine or merge different animations with transparency. Using the Lottie Animation component, for instance, allows you to easily overlay animations on top of each other. By gathering some well-fitting animation and merging them together, Ian managed to simulate a Star Trek-inspired data dashboard. These include some futuristic elements like radar, satellite, a Star Trek logo (SVG image), and even a Klingon font! The session also demonstrates the Skia4Delphi in action and explains all its basic functionalities. Here, you’ll see all the things you can work on in this library including a collection of shapes, texts, paths, effects, and Lottie Animation (as well as the use of Lottie Editor). The most interesting part of this project is that it is surprisingly easy to create and it doesn’t involve many lines of code at all. There is no single line of code that actually manipulates the animations. They all work automatically. To learn more about this amazing project using Delphi and Skia, feel free to watch the video below.

Building a fully functional app is not an easy task. The process is a bit tedious and there are many factors to consider making the project work. Interestingly, in this video from the recently concluded DelphiCon, we will learn how this team of developers managed to build a fully working Delphi app in less than five days! Here, Bruno Fierens will share his success story of how his team managed to create a TMS Web core Progressive Web Application (PWA) Client from the Delphi ide software that is backed by TMS XData REST API backends. Everyone knows Delphi is the most productive development solution for desktop and mobile applications, but what about the web? In this session, you will see how extremely productive and efficient Delphi is for creating full-stack, rich web applications. Building a Working Halloween Web App from Scratch This another successful Delphi story started when Bruno Fierens of TMS Software received an email from Atanas Popov who is the General Manager of Embarcadero. In this email, Atanas asked Bruno and his team if they could build a TMS Web core-powered web app that could be used for the company’s upcoming Halloween Costume contest. The concept is to build a web app where participants can submit their own photos online and be able to share them and collect votes from other members. The challenge, however, is that the app should be up and running within the week and they had to start from scratch. Good thing that there is already a concept and all the requirements have been laid out. From here, they ended up with a web app composed of five pages that users can navigate and explore. This is where the RADoween app came into life. The app is composed of the Main Screen where users can submit their entries (along with the drag and drop function), a Share Page, a Submission List Page, and an Admin Page. Bruno will also demonstrate the architecture behind the application on both the Server and Client sides. One of the things that you will quickly notice is the Form. Interestingly, the structure of the Form designer is totally different from what it looks like when you run the app on the browser. Generally, this is because they used an HTML Template for the form and all the design layout is done via HTML. To learn more about this so-called Thriller project by TMS Software and how they managed to build the RADoween app from scratch within a very short span of time, feel free to watch the video below. Download a free trial copy of RAD Studio Delphi today and follow along!

VCL has always been part of native windows development specifically for developing user interfaces for Microsoft applications. While this GUI framework comes with a huge library of visual components and a robust collection of 3rd party components, it only supports Windows-based development. The FireMonkey framework, on the other hand, is designed for building multi-device cross platform apps including all the supported platforms such as Windows, OS X (Mac), Android, and iOS. Interestingly, in this presentation from the recently concluded DelphiCon, Miguel Angel Moreno will show us how to transform your data centric VCL application to mobile and multi-platform using the FMX framework. What are the differences between VCL and FireMonkey cross platform apps? In this presentation, Miguel will initially highlight the main differences and similarities between the two aforementioned frameworks. Here, he will compare the structures of both the VCL Database application and the FMX database application. Interestingly, FireMonkey is somewhat similar to the VCL library in many aspects. For instance, they have some similar classes, components, controls, and functions but despite some superficial similarities with VCL, FMX still has numerous differences and some of which will be highlighted in this presentation. Here, we will learn all the important components of a VCL database application including the Database Engine, data source, and data navigator. How to successfully convert a VCL Database applications to multi-target cross platform apps with FireMonkey? This session will dive into many important details concerning VCL and FireMonkey database applications. We will learn how to access different database engines including Local databases, thick database clients (the traditional way to connect to corporate databases like Oracle, SQL server), and REST client which is the modern way that most applications are being developed nowadays, especially for mobile applications. Miguel will demonstrate the process of converting a traditional VCL application to a FireMonkey database application from creating a Multi-Device Application in Delphi to Live Bindings, and more. With the help of the Firemonkey multi-platform framework and RAD studio’s powerful database components, this non-trivial process becomes a child’s play! If you want to learn more about these database frameworks, feel free to watch the video below.

The VCL or the Visual Component Library, as we all know, is still the best library for windows app development. While the FireMonkey framework provides wider options for developers, especially when designing or building cross-platform apps, VCL is already a well-established and mature framework that offers a huge library of visual components and a great collection of 3rd party components. In addition to that, the VCL frequently gets new components, features, and bug fixes. In this video, we will dive into some of its newly added components, specifically the CustomTitleBar property and the TTitleBarPanel control. How to create custom title bars in VCL apps From the recently concluded DelphiCon, Ray Konopka of Raize Software will introduce us to the newly added property of the VCL TForm class which is the CustomTitleBar as well as the new TTitleBarPanel control. This property allows you to customize a VCL form’s native title bar similar to Windows Explorer, Google Chrome, and other applications. In this particular video, Ray will demonstrate three samples where he tried to customize VCL title bars that mimic the styles similar to a Word Processor, a Web browser like Chrome, and a GIT GUI Client like SourceTree. The video will demonstrate the things we can possibly do with the Custom Title Bar properties. These include but are not limited to the ability to place VCL controls onto the title bar, the ability to show and hide Window icons and captions, the ability to custom paint over the title bar, and the ability to add additional buttons next to the standard system buttons. What does the TTitleBarPanel do? The session also illustrates how to effectively use the TTitleBarPanel component to significantly enhance an application’s main form. You can fully customize how the title bar is rendered by painting on the title bar and drawing anything on it. To do so, you must place a TTitleBarPanel on the form and set the CustomTitleBar.Control property to it. To show how flexible this component can be, Ray came up with three design challenges to mimic some of the well-known title bar designs. Here, he will introduce us to Phrase that imitates the style of a Word Processor; Bronze that mimics Google Chrome web browser; and CodeTree which is designed to look like SourceTree, a popular Git GUI client. To know more about Custom Title Bars in VCL, feel free to watch the video below. Why not download a free trial of RAD Studio Delphi IDE software and see how it can turbocharge your Windows app development?

In this talk from the recently concluded DelphiCon, Dion Carlos Mai will share with us another important part of windows app development, the Cloud! The session will discuss everything we need to know about Cloud computing and why is it relevant in our current IT market and why does it really matter for a Delphi Developer. Why you need to know about The Cloud By definition of NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management. It is said that Cloud will be the most focal investing technology of small and big companies for 2022. The demand for these cloud models is rapidly growing in recent years for many reasons. For instance, it effectively reduces infrastructure investment for developing and growing companies and is also notably less dependent on third-party knowledge. Why is The Cloud relevant? The most important aspect of the cloud is how it provides companies the flexibility when it comes to expenses. Instead of buying a relatively more expensive new hardware for a new server, a company can take advantage of Cloud and use the cloud management console to configure the amount they want to spend for the cloud service. While the most relevant aspect of the cloud is financial, it may also have technological advantages. What are the different Cloud architectures? This session will also highlight all the available Cloud architectures. Generally, Cloud offers many different service models and each model has its own set of benefits that could serve the needs of various businesses. These include IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) which is considered to be the most expensive yet the simplest model of them all. Another model is PaaS (Platform as a Service) which allows you to use platforms that are already set and you just need to use the management console to configure everything. Which Cloud model suits you the best? SaaS (Software as a Service), on the other hand, gives you access to ready-to-use cloud-hosted application software. The session will also introduce us to other Cloud models including BaaS (Backend as a Service) that provides a complete back-end structure; CaaS (Container as a Service) that allows users to deploy their own container; DaaS (Data as a Service) that provides cloud as a data repository only; DaaS (Desktop as a Service) that provides remote access to our applications by app streaming; and FaaS (Function as a Service) which is described as the most disruptive and most cost-efficient cloud architecture. We will also learn more about various Architectural concepts such as Microservices and Serverless. To learn more about Cloud and all its service models, feel free to watch the video below.