Synopse Open Source

Everyone knows about the pascal random() function.
It returns some numbers, using a linear congruential generator, with a multiplier of 134775813, in its Delphi implementation.
It is fast, but not really secure. Output is very predictable, especially if you forgot to execute the RandSeed() procedure.

In real world scenarios, safety always requires random numbers, e.g. for key/nonce/IV/salt/challenge generation.
The less predictable, the better.
We just included a Cryptographically Secure Pseudo-Random Number Generator (CSPRNG) into our SynCrypto.pas unit.
The TAESPRNG class would use real system entropy to generate a sequence of pseudorandom bytes, using AES-256, so returning highly unpredictable content.

We have seen previously how the ORM part of the framework is able to provide an Audit Trail for change tracking.
It is a very convenient way of storing the change of state of the data.

On the other side, in any modern SOA solution, data is not at the center any more, but services.
Sometimes, the data is not stored within your server, but in a third-party Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).
Being able to monitor the service execution of the whole system becomes sooner or later mandatory.

Our framework allows to create an Audit Trail of any incoming or outgoing service operation, in a secure, efficient and automated way.

If you compare with existing client/server SOA solutions (in Delphi, Java, C# or even in Go or other frameworks), mORMot's interface-based callback mechanism sounds pretty unique and easy to work with.

Most Events Oriented solutions do use a set of dedicated messages to propagate the events, with a centralized Message Bus (like MSMQ or JMS), or a P2P/decentralized approach (see e.g. ZeroMQ or NanoMsg). In practice, you are expected to define one class per message, the class fields being the message values. You would define e.g. one class to notify a successful process, and another class to notify an error. SOA services would eventually tend to be defined by a huge number of individual classes, with the temptation of re-using existing classes in several contexts.

Our interface-based approach allows to gather all events:

• In a single interface type per notification, i.e. probably per service operation;
• With one method per event;
• Using method parameters defining the event values.

Since asynchronous notifications are needed most of the time, method parameters would be one-way, i.e. defined only as const - in such case, an evolved algorithm would transparently gather those outgoing messages, to enhance scalability when processing such asynchronous events. Blocking request may also be defined as var/out, as we will see below, inWorkflow adaptation.

Behind the scene, the framework would still transmit raw messages over IP sockets (currently over a WebSockets connection), like other systems, but events notification would benefit from using interfaces, on both server and client sides.
We will now see how...

Andy reported that he was not able to validate its IDE fix pack for Delphi 10 Seattle, due to its Win64 compiler not being deterministic anymore. The generated code did vary, from one build to other. Sadly, on our side, we identified that the code generated by the Win64 compiler of Delphi 10 Seattle  […]

In Delphi code, NULLable types do not exist as such. There is no native int? type, as in C#.
But at SQL and JSON levels, the NULL value does exist and should be converted as expected by the ORM.

In SQLite3 itself, NULL is handled as stated in http://www.sqlite.org/lang_expr.html (see e.g. IS and IS NOT operators).
It is worth noting that NULL handling is not consistent among all existing database engines, e.g. when you are comparing NULL with non NULL values... so we recommend using it with care in any database statements, or only with proper (unit) testing, when you switch from one database engine to another.

By default, in the mORMot ORM/SQL code, NULL will appear only in case of a BLOB storage with a size of 0 bytes.
Otherwise, you should not see it as a value, in most kinds of ORM properties.

Null-oriented value types have been implemented in our framework, since the object pascal language does not allow defining a nullable type (yet). 

We choose to store those values as variant, with a set of TNullable dedicated types, as defined in mORMot.pas:

type
  TNullableInteger = type variant;
  TNullableBoolean = type variant;
  TNullableFloat = type variant;
  TNullableCurrency = type variant;
  TNullableDateTime = type variant;
  TNullableTimeLog = type variant;
  TNullableUTF8Text = type variant;

Today, an avalanche of "false postitive detection" of AVAST heuristic engine did occur.
Any executable built with Delphi XE8 or Delphi 10 Seattle was identified as a Win32:Banker-MGC [Trj] threat!

Heuristic analysis is a method employed by many computer antivirus programs designed to detect previously unknown computer viruses, as well as new variants of viruses already in the "wild".

Back in 2013, I found out an implementation weakness in the implementation of ARC weak references in the RTL.
A giant lock was freezing all threads and cores, so would decrease a lot the performance abilities of any ARC application, especially in multi thread.

I just investigated that things are now better.

You may have missed the news. So I relay here the information from Delphinus PackageManager blog article. Delphinus is a new Package Manager, which runs on Delphi XE and newer, directly from within your IDE. It is GitHub-based, and fairly easy to add a reference to. Of course, I tried to add mORMot  […]

Among all its means of transmission, our mORMot framework features WebSockets, allowing bidirectional communications, and interface-based callbacks for real time notification of SOA events.
After several months of use in production, we identified some needed changes for this just emerged feature.

We committed today a breaking change of the data layout used for our proprietary WebSockets binary protocol.
From our tests, it would increase the performance and decrease the resource consumption, especially in case of high number of messages.

A lot of our code, and probably yours, is highly relying on text process. In our mORMot framework, most of its features use JSON text, encoded as UTF-8. Profiling shows that a lot of time is spent computing the end of a text buffer, or comparing text content. You may know that In its SSE4.2 feature  […]