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2012, Thursday May 3
By A.Bouchez on 2012, Thursday May 3, 17:16 - mORMot Framework
By default, during interface-based service call,
any record parameter or function result will be serialized with
our proprietary binary (and optimized layout) - i.e. RecordLoad
and RecordSave functions - then encoded in Base-64, to be
stored as plain text within the JSON stream.
But custom record JSON serialization can be defined, as with any
class - see this article - or
dynamic array - see this
article.
2012, Wednesday April 25
By A.Bouchez on 2012, Wednesday April 25, 06:27 - mORMot Framework
In a discussion with Henrick Hellström, in Embarcadero forums, I wrote some high-level information about mORMot.
It was clear to me that our little mORMot is now far away from a simple Client-Server solution.
The Henrick point was that with Real Thin Client (RTC), you are able to write any Client-Server solution, even a RESTful / JSON based one.
He is of course right, but it made clear to me all the work done in
mORMot since its beginning.
From a Client-Server ORM, it is now a complete SOA framework, ready to serve
Domain-Driven-Design solutions.
2012, Thursday April 19
By A.Bouchez on 2012, Thursday April 19, 06:23 - Pascal Programing
Did you hear from the great Smart project?
It is an IDE and some source runtime able to develop and compile an
Object-Pascal project into a HTML 5 / CSS 3 / JavaScript embedded
application.
It does target AJAX Mobile application creation (i.e. Android and
iPhone/iPad apps running Web-Kit).
You'll get an unique .html file containing the whole client-side
application: it won't need any server side implementation. Using a third-party
tool like PhoneGap, you'd be able to supply your customers with true
native applications, running without any network, and accessing the full power
of any modern Smart Phone.
Smart is a great candidate for implementing rich client-side AJAX applications, to work with our client-server mORMot framework.
In order to interface Smart code with mORMot, we started implementing some low-level code to work with our RESTful authentication scheme.
So we'll need to implement some Smart dedicated Open Source code implementing crc32 and SHA-256 hashing.
2012, Sunday January 29
By A.Bouchez on 2012, Sunday January 29, 14:30 - mORMot Framework
For our native connection to any DB, we developed a set of classes and several units.
We implemented at first OleDB, then native Oracle direct access and SQlite3 static engine.
Now, Microsoft is officially deprecating OleDB, and urge all developers to switch to the open and cross-platform ODBC API for native connection.
2011, Tuesday December 6
By A.Bouchez on 2011, Tuesday December 6, 22:08 - mORMot Framework
In mORMot, all the methods available to handle many-to-many
relationship (ManySelect, DestGetJoined...) are used to
retrieve the relations between tables from the pivot table point of view. This
saves bandwidth, and can be used in most simple cases, but it is not the only
way to perform requests on many-to-many relationships. And you may have several
TSQLRecordMany instances in the same main record - in this case,
those methods won't help you.
It is very common, in the SQL world, to create a JOINed request at the main "Source" table level, and combine records from two or more tables in a database. It creates a set that can be saved as a table or used as is. A JOIN is a means for combining fields from two or more tables by using values common to each. Writing such JOINed statements is not so easy by hand, especially because you'll have to work with several tables, and have to specify the exact fields to be retrieved; if you have several pivot tables, it may start to be a nightmare.
Let's see how our ORM will handle it.
2011, Sunday September 25
By A.Bouchez on 2011, Sunday September 25, 21:46 - mORMot Framework
Our Client-Server ORM framework is now available in revision 1.15.
This is a major upgrade of the framework:
TModTime / TCreateTime kind of fields;By A.Bouchez on 2011, Sunday September 25, 13:59 - SQLite3 Framework
In case you were redirected from the previous "Synopse SQLite3
framework" category link, here is the new thread to be used instead:
http://blog.synopse.info/category/Open-Source-Projects/mORMot-Framework
Since revision 1.15 of the framework, it is able to connect to any database engine (therefore is not limited to SQLite3), and is now called mORMot.
2011, Saturday August 20
By A.Bouchez on 2011, Saturday August 20, 10:24 - Open Source libraries
We already shipped a sophisticated set of logging classes some month ago.
Since then, its features have been enhanced, and the system has been deeply interfaced with our main ORM framework. Now almost all low-level or high-level operations can be logged on request.
But since the log files tend to be huge (for instance, if you set the logging for our unitary tests, the 6,000,000 unitary tests creates a 280 MB log file), a log viewer was definitively in need.
2011, Wednesday August 10
By A.Bouchez on 2011, Wednesday August 10, 20:52 - mORMot Framework
The framework documentation was just updated.
The general organization of the SAD document (which is the one to be read in all cases) has been refreshed, and is now separated in smaller chapters.
The new official name has been changed into "Synopse SQLite3/mORMot framework"...
2011, Monday August 8
By A.Bouchez on 2011, Monday August 8, 06:41 - mORMot Framework
Everybody is buzzing about FireMonkey...
Our little mORMot will like FireMonkey!
Here is why...
2011, Sunday August 7
By A.Bouchez on 2011, Sunday August 7, 09:46 - mORMot Framework
Our downloadable documentation has been enhanced, and contains now a description about the main feature of the near-to-come 1.15 version, i.e. "database agnosticism".
The core database of our mORMot / SQLite3 framework uses the SQLite3 library, which is a Free, Secure, Zero-Configuration, Server-less, Single Stable Cross-Platform Database File database engine.
As stated below, you can use any other database access layer, if you wish. A fast in-memory engine is included, and can be used instead or together with the SQLite3 engine. Since revision 1.15 of the framework you may be able to access any remote database, and use one or more OleDB (or Oracle) connections to store your precious ORM objects. The SQlite3 will be used as the main SQL engine, able to JOIN all those tables, thanks to its Virtual Table unique feature.
2011, Monday July 25
By A.Bouchez on 2011, Monday July 25, 22:19 - mORMot Framework
Our ORM RESTful Framework is about to access any available database engine.
It will probably change its name (since it won't use only SQlite3 as database), to become mORMot - could be an acronym for "Manage Object Relational Mapping Over Tables", or whatever you may think of...
We'll still rely on SQLite3 on the server, but a dedicated mechanism will allow to access via OleDB any remote database, and mix those tables content with the native ORM tables of the framework. A flexible Virtual Tables and column mapping will allow any possible architecture: either a new project in pure ORM, either a project relying on an existing database with its own table layout.
2011, Saturday July 9
By A.Bouchez on 2011, Saturday July 9, 11:46 - mORMot Framework
For our upcoming mORMot framework, and in completion to our SynOleDB unit, we just added a new Open Source unit, named SynDBOracle. It allows direct access to any remote Oracle server, using the Oracle Call Interface.
Oracle Call Interface (OCI) is the most comprehensive, high
performance, native unmanaged interface to the Oracle Database that exposes the
full power of the Oracle Database. We wrote a direct call of the
oci.dll library, using our DB abstraction classes introduced for
SynOleDB.
We tried to implement all best-practice patterns detailed in the official Building High Performance Drivers for Oracle document
Resulting speed is quite impressive: for all requests, SynDBOracle is 3 to 5 times faster than a SynOleDB connection using the native OleDB Provider supplied by Oracle. We noted also that our implementation is 10 times faster than the one provided with ZEOS/ZDBC, which is far from optimized.
You can use the latest version of the Oracle Instant Client
provided by Oracle - see this
link - which allows you to run your applications without installing
the standard (huge) Oracle client or having an ORACLE_HOME. Just
deliver the dll files in the same directory than your application,
and it will work.
2011, Sunday July 3
By A.Bouchez on 2011, Sunday July 3, 20:12 - SQLite3 Framework
Here is what wikipedia states at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_nothing_architecture:
A shared nothing architecture (SN) is a distributed computing architecture in which each node is independent and self-sufficient, and there is no single point of contention across the system. People typically contrast SN with systems that keep a large amount of centrally-stored state information, whether in a database, an application server, or any other similar single point of contention.
This is just one approach of "sharding". Sharding is indeed related to a
shared nothing architecture - once sharded, each shard can live in a totally
separate logical schema instance.
"I sharded, therefore it scales"...
You can do this in Delphi... and opens a new world of scaling opportunities... Just as Google, Facebook, or eBay do...
2011, Saturday July 2
By A.Bouchez on 2011, Saturday July 2, 11:32 - mORMot Framework
There is a well known syndrome around, against ORM.
Do you remember The Vietnam of Computer Science article?
It is worth reading... and commenting.
Sounds a bit outdated by now. Tempus fugit!
By A.Bouchez on 2011, Saturday July 2, 10:27 - mORMot Framework
For both our SynOleDB and SynBigTable units, we allow late-binding of data row values, using a variant and direct named access of properties. Thanks to this unique feature (as far as I know in the Delphi database world),
This allows clear and valid code as such:
var Customer: Variant;
begin
with Props.Execute(
'select * from Sales.Customer where AccountNumber like ?',
['AW000001%'],@Customer) do
while Step do
assert(Copy(Customer.AccountNumber,1,8)='AW000001');
end;
In practice, this code is slower than using a standard property based access, like this:
while Step do
assert(Copy(Column['AccountNumber'],1,8)='AW000001');
But the first version, using late-binding of column name, just sounds more natural.
Of course, since it's late-binding, we are not able to let the compiler check at compile time for the column name. If the column name in the source code is wrong, an error will be triggered at runtime only. But it would not be an issue, since it would be the same for the SQL code inserted: it's only executed at runtime (this is one of the benefits of using an ORM, by the way: the ORM will generate correct SQL code for you...).
The default VCL implementation of this late-binding was a bit slow
for our purpose.
Since it has to deal with Ole Automation, and because it's fun, we
hacked the VCL to provide a lighter and faster version for our custom variant
types.
2011, Friday July 1
By A.Bouchez on 2011, Friday July 1, 09:09 - mORMot Framework
That's it, our SynOleDB unit seems alive and running well.
OLE DB (Object Linking and Embedding, Database, sometimes written as OLEDB or OLE-DB) is an API designed by Microsoft for accessing data from a variety of sources in a uniform manner. It was designed as a higher-level replacement for, and successor to, ODBC, extending its feature set to support a wider variety of non-relational databases, such as object databases and spreadsheets that do not necessarily implement SQL.
SynOleDB unit implementation has been made with several points in
mind:
TOleDBConnection per thread); TDynArrayHashed);TQuery-like wrapper.2011, Wednesday June 29
By A.Bouchez on 2011, Wednesday June 29, 06:10 - SQLite3 Framework
Our ORM framework has been released as version 1.14.
It's mainly a bug-fix release:
2011, Tuesday June 7
By A.Bouchez on 2011, Tuesday June 7, 21:40 - Pascal Programing
For our ORM, we needed a class variable to be available for each
TSQLRecord class type.
This variable is used to store the properties of this class type, i.e. the
database Table properties (e.g. table and column names and types) associated
with a particular TSQLRecord class, from which all our ORM objects
inherit.
The class var statement was not enough for us:
- It's not available on earlier Delphi versions, and we try to have our
framework work with Delphi 6-7 up to XE;
- This class var instance will be shared by all classes inheriting
from the class where it is defined - and we need ONE instance PER class type,
not ONE instance for ALL
We needed to find another way to implement this class variable.
An unused VMT slot in the class type description was identified, then each class definition was patched in the process memory to contain our class variable.
2011, Thursday June 2
By A.Bouchez on 2011, Thursday June 2, 16:16 - SQLite3 Framework
When it deals with parsing some (textual) content, two directions are
usually envisaged. In the XML world, you have usually to make a choice
between:
- A DOM parser, which creates an in-memory tree structure of objects mapping
the XML nodes;
- A SAX parser, which reads the XML content, then call pre-defined
events for each XML content element.
In fact, DOM parsers use internally a SAX parser to read the XML content. Therefore, with the overhead of object creation and their property initialization, DOM parsers are typically three to five times slower than SAX. But, DOM parsers are much more powerful for handling the data: as soon as it's mapped in native objects, code can access with no time to any given node, whereas a SAX-based access will have to read again the whole XML content.
Most JSON parser available in Delphi use a DOM-like approach. For instance, the DBXJSON unit included since Delphi 2010 or the SuperObject or DWS libraries create a class instance mapping each JSON node.
In a JSON-based Client-Server ORM like ours, profiling shows that a lot of time is spent in JSON parsing, on both Client and Server side. Therefore, we tried to optimize this part of the library.
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