Synopse Open Source

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.

Our Client-Server ORM framework is now available in revision 1.15.

This is a major upgrade of the framework:

• It is now called mORMot - so please update your T-Shirts or coffee cups
• It is able to use any Database engine back-end - in fact, it is SQLite3 powered, not SQLite3 limited;
• In particular, direct OleDB and native Oracle have been implemented;
• It makes use of the genuine SQlite3 Virtual Table mechanism everywhere to allow mixed access to any database engine;
• New TModTime / TCreateTime kind of fields;
• Enhanced stability, speed and multi-thread implementation;
• Methods and functions have been enhanced, according to user feedback (thanks you all for your interest and forum posts!);
• Extended documentation (more than 700 pdf pages), with new diagrams and a lot of new content;
• New associated tools, like LogViewer or SynDBExplorer;
• The SQLite3 core can now be used without our ORM - it has been updated to the latest 3.7.8 version;
• Open Source (under GPL/LGPL/MPL license), running from Delphi 6 up to XE2.

For our ORM framework, we implemented an efficient SQLite3 wrapper, joining statically (i.e. without any external dll) the SQLite3 engine to the executable. SQLite3 is in fact used as the DB kernel of the framework. For instance, thanks to its unique virtual table mechanism, even tables in other databases (like Oracle or MSSQL) are available as if they were SQLite3 tables.

We just made this wrapper independent from our ORM, in a new dedicated unit, named SynSQLite3.pas.

It was an easy task to let this unit be called from our SynDB database abstract classes.

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.

Our ORM framework has been released as version 1.14.

It's mainly a bug-fix release:

• Integrated SQLite3 engine updated to latest version 3.7.7.1;
• Fix several issues about JSON generation layout;
• Enhanced automated User Interface generation for object on-screen edition;
• SynPdf unit now handles Bézier curves from TCanvas, and some CMYK functions; also enhanced PDF/A-1compatibility;
• Some speed enhancements, and new functions for the SynOleDB unit.