Imagine

Imagine your access to functionally useful
libraries, components, controls that are hard to find in the Delphi developer
community suddenly became easily available.

Visualize

Visualize you had no more concerns what
platform or what framework to choose for developing your next solution for your
customers.

Dream

Dream you can start adding seamlessly
exciting new functionality to your existing applications.

That is exactly the core goal of the brand
new WX concept we reveal today with TMS FNC WX Pack. In a nutshell, WX means
“Packaging Web technology in easy-to-use components for integration in any
type of Delphi application“.

With WX Pack, you can leverage existing Web
libraries in VCL Windows applications, FMX cross-platform applications for
Windows, macOS, iOS, Android & Linux, or TMS WEB Core Web applications for
any device running a modern browser.

How does it work?

The foundation of the WX concept is our
powerful TMS FNC Browser component with its accompanying bridge technology. The
FNC browser wraps the native operating system browser for the VCL, FMX, or LCL
framework and offers a sort of virtual embedded browser in a TMS WEB Core Web
application. This FNC browser is used to host a Web library with the choice to
host it for offline or for online use. You can opt for online use to make the
component lighter or offline use which means that the component will take up
somewhat more size in your executable (depending on the component of course)
but with the guarantee it will run fine without an Internet connection. Thanks
to the FNC bridge technology, the native application-level component can
communicate with the browser hosted library and vice versa. As a Delphi
developer, this is all abstracted and you only deal with it at Object Pascal
level as a component and its properties, methods, and events.

Where do we start?

There is an abundance of existing Web
libraries, so where to start was the big question. The answer was simply
listening to you, the user. For quite some time, among the most popular
requests for new components were a barcode generator component, a QR code
generating component, an HTML editor, a PDF viewer, …

And so, that is exactly where we started
our research and initial development to bring these components as part of the
WX concept. It enables us to deliver these kinds of components in a fraction of
the time otherwise needed to build them from the ground up, and it is an
opportunity to leverage proven, well-tested, and widely popular existing
libraries.

The first group of components

In the first beta build of TMS FNC WX Pack,
we have:

TTMSFNCWXBarCode
This components offers close to hundred different barcode types with lots of customization properties for these barcode types.

TTMSFNCWXQRCode
Component to generate QR codes of different type and with several customizations like logo in QR code for example

TTMSFNCWXHTMLMemo
Edit HTML directly with the TTMSFNCWXHTMLMemo component. It has an optional embedded format toolbar or can be used with external toolbar. Programmatic access to all formatting capabilities is available. Content is loaded and saved directly as HTML.

TTMSFNCWXPDFViewer

With this component on the form, you can display PDF files in your applications, including page thumbnails. There is programmatic access to navigate through pages, search text, …

TTMSFNCWXCamera

Access your device camera with the TTMSFNCWXCamera component and programmatically take pictures

Curious?

Eager to see it in action, check our first video we prepared:

Availability?

The first beta build is available for all
TMS ALL-ACCESS users with an active license. You will find this beta build in
your account, or you can access it from the TMS Subscription Manager. You can
download this new product now and start tinkering with it.

What’s next?

With your feedback, this will lead to the
release of the first version TMS FNC WX Pack (v1.0). It will be available as
part of TMS ALL-ACCESS, TMS FNC Component Studio, and as a stand-alone product.

In the meantime, additional components for
TMS FNC WX Pack are already in development, and we will reveal these shortly.
But other than this, it will be mostly YOU who will determine the future shape
& content of the TMS FNC WX Pack. If you have the need for specific
functionality not readily available in the Delphi component offerings but
easily available for Web developers, let us know and our team will research
wrapping it into a Delphi component with the WX concept. Leave a comment or
send us a direct email with your ideas!