Synopse Open Source

In a previous article, we presented how Master/Slave replication may be easily implemented in mORMot's RESTful ORM.
Do not forget to visit the corresponding paragraphs of our online documentation, which has been updated, and is more accurate!

Sometimes, the on-demand synchronization is not enough.
So we have just introduced real-time replication via WebSockets.
For instance, you may need to:

• Synchronize a short list of always evolving items which should be reflected as soon as possible;
• Involve some kind of ACID-like behavior (e.g. handle money!) in your replicated data;
• Replicate not from a GUI application, but from a service, so use of a TTimer is not an option;
• Combine REST requests (for ORM or services) and master/slave ORM replication on the same wire, e.g. in a multi-threaded application.

In this case, the framework is able to use WebSockets and asynchronous callbacks to let the master/slave replication - see Asynchronous callbacks - take place without the need to ask explicitly for pending data.
You would need to use TSQLRestServer.RecordVersionSynchronizeMasterStart, TSQLRestServer.RecordVersionSynchronizeSlaveStart and TSQLRestServer.RecordVersionSynchronizeSlaveStop methods over the proper kind of bidirectional connection.

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.

For mORMot, we developed a fully feature direct access layer to any RDBMS, implemented in the SynDB.pas unit.

You can use those SynDB classes to execute any SQL statement, without any link to the framework ORM.
At reading, the resulting performance is much higher than using the standard TDataSet component, which is in fact a true performance bottleneck.
It has genuine features, like column access via late-binding, an innovative ISQLDBRows interface, and ability to directly access the low-level binary buffers of the database clients.

We just added a nice feature to those classes: the ability to access remotely, via plain HTTP, to any SynDB supported database!

Working with objects is pretty powerful, but requires to handle manually the created instances life time, via try .. finally blocks. Most of the time, the TSQLRecord life time would be very short: we allocate one instance on a local variable, then release it when it goes out of scope.

If we take again the TSQLBaby sample, we may write:

function NewMaleBaby(Client: TSQLRest; const Name,Address: RawUTF8): TID;
var Baby: TSQLBaby;   // store a record
begin
  Baby := TSQLBaby.Create;
  try
    Baby.Name := Name;
    Baby.Address := Address;
    Baby.BirthDate := Date;
    Baby.Sex := sMale;
    result := Client.Add(Baby);
  finally
    Baby.Free;
  end;
end;

To ease this pretty usual pattern, the framework offers some kind of automatic memory management at TSQLRecord level:

function NewMaleBaby(Client: TSQLRest; const Name,Address: RawUTF8): TID;
var Baby: TSQLBaby;   // store a record
begin
  TSQLBaby.AutoFree(Baby);  // no try..finally needed!
  Baby.Name := Name;
  Baby.Address := Address;
  Baby.BirthDate := Date;
  Baby.Sex := sMale;
  result := Client.Add(Baby);
end; // local Baby instance will be released here

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:

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.

It is pretty much possible that you would have to maintain and evolve a legacy project, based on an existing database, with a lot of already written SQL statements - see Legacy code and existing projects.

For instance, you would like to use mORMot for new features, and/or add mobile or HTML clients - see Cross-Platform clients.
In this case, the ORM advanced features - like ORM Cache or BATCH process, see BATCH sequences for adding/updating/deleting records - may conflict with the legacy code, for the tables which may have to be shared.
Here are some guidelines when working on such a project.

To be exhaustive about your question, we need to consider each ORM CRUD operation.
We may have to divide them in three kinds: read queries, insertions, and modifications of existing data.

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!

Since most CRUD operations are centered within the scope of our mORMot server, we implemented in the ORM an integrated mean of tracking changes (aka Audit Trail) of any TSQLRecord.
In short, our ORM is transformed into a time-machine, just like the good old DeLorean!

Keeping a track of the history of business objects is one very common need for software modeling, and a must-have for any accurate data modeling, like Domain-Driven Design.
By default, as expected by the OOP model, any change to an object will forget any previous state of this object. But thanks to mORMot's exclusive change-tracking feature, you can persist the history of your objects.

Enabling audit-trail

By default, change-tracking feature will be disabled, saving performance and disk use.
But you can enable change tracking for any class, by calling the following method, on server side:

 aServer.TrackChanges([TSQLInvoice]);

This single line will let aServer: TSQLRestServer monitor all CRUD operations, and store all changes of the TSQLInvoice table within a TSQLRecordHistory table.