Synopse Open Source

It is time for a new mORMot release!

OpenAPI, which was formerly called Swagger, is a set of specifications to encode the server API endpoints definitions into text, mostly JSON.
From this reference text, you can generate client code to access the service, in a vast number of languages.

Delphi seems to be far behind other languages, in terms of this code generation. I found nothing even working for FPC.
Since we needed it for our internal tools at Tranquil IT, we just published the new mormot.net.openapi.pas Open Source unit, which is quite a game changer. Thanks Andreas for starting this project, and testing it in its early age!

Last year 2023 was perhaps not the best ever, and, just after Christmas, we think about all people we know still in war or distress.
But in the small mORMot world, 2023 was a fine millesima. A lot of exciting features, a pretty good rank in benchmarks, and a proof of being ready for the next decade.

For this new year, we would like to introduce you to a new mORMot baby: the mget command line tool, a HTTP/HTTPS web client with peer-to-peer caching.
It is just a wrapper around a set of the new PeerCache feature, built-in the framework web client class - so you can use it in your own projects if you need to.

Round 22 of the TechEmpower Frameworks has just finished.
And this time, there was a pascal framework in the race: our little mORMot!

Numbers are quite good, because we are rated #12 among 302 frameworks over 791 runs of several configurations.

Since its earliest days, our mORMot framework did offer extensive regression tests. In fact, it is fully test-driven, and almost 78 million individual tests are performed to cover all its abilities:

We just integrated those tests to the TranquilIT build farm, and its great LUTI tool. So we have now continuous integration tests over several versions of Windows, Linux, and even Mac!
LUTI is the best mORMot's friends these days.

For most projects, we want to be able to pass some custom values when starting it.
The command line is then used to add this additional information.

We have ParamStr and ParamCount global functions, enough to retrieve the information. You may also use FindCmdLineSwitch for something more easy to work with.
The Lazarus RTL offers some additional methods like hasOption or getOptionValue or checkOptions in its TCustomApplication class. Their are better, but not so easy to use, and not available on Delphi.

We just committed a new command line parser to our Open Source mORMot 2 framework, which works on both Delphi and FPC, follows both Windows and POSIX/Linux conventions, and has much more features (like automated generation of the help message), in an innovative and easy workflow.

This is perhaps the last new feature of mORMot 2 before its first stable release: a very efficient custom URI routing for our HTTP/HTTPS servers.

At ORM and SOA level, there is by-convention routing of the URI, depending on the ORM table, SOA interface and method, and TOrmModel.Root value. Even for our MVC web part, we rely on a /root/ URI prefix, which may not be always needed.
Relying on convention is perfect between mORMot clients and servers, but in some cases, it may be handy to have something smoother, e.g. to publish a truly REST scheme.

We introduced two routing abilities to mORMot 2, with amazing performance (6-12 million parsings per CPU core), via a new THttpServerGeneric.Route property:

• Internal URI rewrite, to redirect internally from a human/REST-friendly request e.g. to a SOA /root/interface.method layout, or to a MVC web page;
• Direct callback execution, with optional parameter parsing.

Article edited on 28th December:
Fixed performance numbers (much higher than reported), and introduced latest source changes.

Since the beginning, we delegated the TLS encryption support to a reverse proxy server, mainly Nginx. Under Windows, you could setup the http.sys HTTPS layer as usual, as a native - even a bit complicated - solution.
Nginx has several advantages, the first being a proven and efficient technology, with plenty of documentation and configuration tips. It interfaces nicely with Let's Encrypt, and is very good for any regular website, using static content and PHP. This very blog and the Synopse web site is hosted via Ngnix on a small Linux server.

But in mORMot 2, we introduced a new set of asynchronous web server classes. So stability and performance are not a problem any more. Some benchmarks even consider this server to be faster than nginx (the stability issue mentioned in this post has been fixed in-between).
We just introduced TLS support of our socket-based servers, both the blocking and asynchronous classes. It would use OpenSSL if available, or the SChannel API layer of Windows. Serving HTTPS or WSS with a self-signed certificate is just a matter of a single parameter now, and performance seems pretty good, especially with OpenSSL.

The official release of mORMot 2 is around the edge. It may be the occasion to show some data persistence performance numbers, in respect to mORMot 1.

For the version 2 of our framework, its ORM feature has been enhanced and tuned in several aspects: REST routing optimization, ORM/JSON serialization, and in-memory and SQL engines tuning. Numbers are talking. You could compare with any other solution, and compile and run the tests by yourself for both framework, and see how it goes on your own computer or server.
In a nutshell, we almost reach 1 million inserts per second on SQLite3, and are above the million inserts in our in-memory engine. Reading speed is 1.2 million and 1.7 million respectively. From the object to the storage, and back. And forcing AES-CTR encryption on disk almost don't change anything. Now we are talking.

Generics are a clever way of writing some code once, then reuse it for several types.
They are like templates, or compiler-time shortcuts for type definitions.

In the last weeks, we added a new mormot.core.collections.pas unit, which features:

• JSON-aware IList<> List Storage;
• JSON-aware IKeyValue<> Dictionary Storage.

In respect to Delphi or FPC RTL generics.collections, this unit uses interfaces as variable holders, and leverage them to reduce the generated code as much as possible, as the Spring4D 2.0 framework does, but for both Delphi and FPC. It publishes TDynArray and TSynDictionary high-level features like indexing, sorting, JSON/binary serialization or thread safety as Generics strong typing.

Resulting performance is great, especially for its enumerators, and your resulting executable size won't blow up as with the regular RTL unit.