Synopse Open Source

Do you know QDAC3 ?
This is an open source project, from China (with Chinese comments and exception errors messages, but the methods and variables are in English).
It is cross-platform, and told to be very fast about JSON process.

You can download this Open Source project code from http://sourceforge.net/projects/qdac3
And their blog - in Chinese - is at http://blog.qdac.cc/

So I included QDAC3 in our "25 - JSON performance" sample.
Numbers are talking, now.

How would be 2015 like for our little rodents?
Due to popular request of several users of mORMot, we identified and designed some feature requests dedicated to BigData process.

In fact, your data is the new value, especially if you propose SaaS (Software As A Service) hosting to your customers, with a farm of mORMot servers.
Recent Linux support for mORMot servers, together with the high performance and installation ease of our executable, open the gate to cheap cloud-based hosting.
As a consequence, a lot of information would certainly be gathered by your mORMot servers, and a single monolithic database is not an option any more.

For mORMot solutions hosted in cloud, a lot of data may be generated. The default SQLite3 storage engine may be less convenient, once it reaches some GB of file content. Backup becomes to be slow and inefficient, and hosting this oldest data in the main DB, probably stored on an expensive SSD, may be a lost of resource. Vertical scaling is limited by hardware and price factors.

This is were data sharding comes into scene.
Note that sharding is not replication/backup, nor clustering, nor just spreading. We are speaking about application-level data splitting, to ease maintenance and horizontal scalability of mORMot servers.

Data sharding could already be implemented with mORMot servers, thanks to TSQLRestStorage:

• Using TSQLRestStorageExternal: any table may have its own external SQL database engine, may be in its separated DB server;
• Using TSQLRestStorageMongoDB: any table may be stored on a MongoDB cluster, with its own sharding abilities;
• Using TSQLRestStorageRemote: each table may have its own remote ORM/REST server.

But when data stored in a single table tends to grow without limit, this feature is not enough.
Let's see how the close future of mORMot looks like.

Current version of the main framework units target only Win32 and Win64 systems.

It allows to make easy self-hosting of mORMot servers for local business applications in any corporation, or pay cheap hosting in the Cloud, since mORMot CPU and RAM expectations are much lower than a regular IIS-WCF-MSSQL-.Net stack.
But in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), you would probably need to create clients for platforms outside the Windows world, especially mobile devices.

A set of cross-platform client units is therefore available in the CrossPlatform sub-folder of the source code repository. It allows writing any client in modern object pascal language, for:

• Any version of Delphi, on any platform (Mac OSX, or any mobile supported devices);
• FreePascal Compiler 2.7.1;
• Smart Mobile Studio 2.1, to create AJAX or mobile applications (via PhoneGap, if needed).

This series of articles will introduce you to mORMot's Cross-Platform abilities:

• Units and platforms;
• Generating the client code wrappers;
• Delphi / FreePascal clients;
• Smart Mobile Studio clients.

Any feedback is welcome in our forum, as usual!

Current version of the main framework units target only Win32 and Win64 systems.

It allows to make easy self-hosting of mORMot servers for local business applications in any corporation, or pay cheap hosting in the Cloud, since mORMot CPU and RAM expectations are much lower than a regular IIS-WCF-MSSQL-.Net stack.
But in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), you would probably need to create clients for platforms outside the Windows world, especially mobile devices.

A set of cross-platform client units is therefore available in the CrossPlatform sub-folder of the source code repository. It allows writing any client in modern object pascal language, for:

• Any version of Delphi, on any platform (Mac OSX, or any mobile supported devices);
• FreePascal Compiler 2.7.1;
• Smart Mobile Studio 2.1, to create AJAX or mobile applications (via PhoneGap, if needed).

This series of articles will introduce you to mORMot's Cross-Platform abilities:

• Units and platforms;
• Generating the client code wrappers;
• Delphi / FreePascal clients;
• Smart Mobile Studio clients.

Any feedback is welcome in our forum, as usual!

By default, interface-based services of a mORMot server will always return a JSON array (or a JSON object, if TServiceFactoryServer.ResultAsJSONObject is true).
With some kind of clients (e.g. if they are made by a third party), it could be useful to return XML content instead.

Your mORMot server is able to let its interface-based services return XML context instead, or in addition to the default JSON format.

There were a lot of debate about what "native" was..

Especially for some great companies, you want to sell their compiler technologies...
For them, "native" is not CPU-native, but framework-native...

Even Microsoft claimed since the beginning of C# that the managed .Net model was faster, due to "optimized JIT or NGEN compilation"...

But even Microsoft is clearly changing its mind!

They switch to "Native" for their framework, especially when targeting mobile platforms!

Mustache is a well-known logic-less template engine.
There is plenty of Open Source implementations around (including in JavaScript, which can be very convenient for AJAX applications on client side, for instance).
For mORMot, we created the first pure Delphi implementation of it, with a perfect integration with other bricks of the framework.

In this second part of this series of blog articles, we will introduce the Mustache syntax.
You can download this documentation as one single pdf file.

We all know that the first Delphi for Android was just released...

I just found out an amazing alternative, using native Android controls, and FPC/Lazarus as compiler and IDE.

It creates small .apk file: only 180 KB, from my tests!

It makes use of direct LCL access of Android native controls, so it is a great sample.

Apart from being very slow during compilation, the Delphi NextGen compiler introduced a new memory model, named ARC.

We already spoke about ARC years ago, so please refer to our corresponding blog article for further information, especially about how Apple did introduce ARC to iOS instead of the Garbage Collector model.

About how ARC is to be used in the NextGen compiler, take a look at Marco's blog article, and its linked resources.

But the ARC model, as implemented by Embarcadero, has at least one huge performance issue, in the way weak references, and zeroing weak pointers have been implemented.
I do not speak about the general slow down introduced during every class/record initialization/finalization, which is noticeable, but not a big concern.

If you look at XE4 internals, you will discover a disappointing global lock introduced in the RTL.

It is a strong-typed, compiled, cross-platform, and concurrent.
It features some nice high-level structures, like maps and strings, and still have very low-level access to the generated code: pointers are there, in a safe strong-typed implementation just like in pascal, and there is even a "goto", which sounds like an heresy to dogmatic coders, but does make sense to me, at least when you want to optimize code speed, in some rare cases.

It is created/pushed by Google, used internally by the company in their computer farms, and was designed by one of the original C creators.