Tag - MVVM - Synopse Open Source

Try to avoid RTTI (ab)use

There is a very trendy move, since a few years, to value so called "meta-programming".
In short, it is about the ability to treat programs as their data.
It is a very powerful paradigm in functional languages, and it was also introduced to OOP languages, even in SmallTalk a long time before this concept was trendy in Ruby, C# or Java.

In OOP compiled languages, reflection is used to achieve a similar behavior at run-time, mainly via RTTI (Run-Time Type Information).
Delphi supports RTTI since its version 1, as it was heavily used e.g. for all UI streaming.
In our framework, we rely on RTTI for its main features: ORM, SOA and MVC - and even in some other parts, like Desktop UI generation.

But RTTI could easily be abused.
Here are some thoughts, started as a comment in a good old Mason's blog article about how RTTI performance may be a bottleneck.
My comment was to get rid of RTTI, and follow a SOLID implementation with explicit OOP code, like use of interface.

MVC/MVVM Web Applications

We almost finished implementing a long-standing feature request, introducing MVC / MVVM for Web Applications (like RubyOnRails) in mORMot.
This is a huge step forward, opening new perspectives not only to our framework, but for the Delphi community.
In respect to the existing MVC frameworks for Delphi, our solution is closer to Delphi On Rails (by the convention-over-configuration pattern) than the Delphi MVC Framework or XMM.
The mORMot point of view is unique, and quite powerful, since it is integrated with other parts of our framework, as its ORM/ODM or interface-based services.
Of course, this is a work in progress, so you are welcome to put your feedback, patches or new features!

We will now explain how to build a MVC/MVVM web application using mORMot, starting from the "30 - MVC Server" sample.
First of all, check the source in our GitHub repository: two .pas files, and a set of minimalist Mustache views.

This little web application publishes a simple BLOG, not fully finished yet (this is a Sample, remember!).
But you can still execute it in your desktop browser, or any mobile device (thanks to a simple Bootstrap-based responsive design), and see the articles list, view one article and its comments, view the author information, log in and out.

This sample is implemented as such:

MVVM	Source	mORMot
Model	`MVCModel.pas`	`TSQLRestServerDB` ORM over a SQlite3 database
View	`*.html`	Mustache template engine in the Views sub-folder
ViewModel	`MVCViewModel.pas`	Defined as one `IBlogApplication` interface

For the sake of the simplicity, the sample will create some fake data in its own local SQlite3 database, the first time it is executed.