Synopse Open Source

The EKON 29 Konference in Dusseldorf just ended.

Nice year, with a lot of AI talks.
To keep the pressure low, I did not talk about AI, but gave 3 sessions and 1 workshop about mORMot. Here are the slides I used.

As you may have noticed, our forum was not available since Friday evening until this Saturday afternoon (Paris time).

In fact, our Dedibox hardware, which was running fine for years, just break down, and was not able to reboot.
The Dedibox/ScaleWay/Online service answered to my ticket that... the server just died... and they were not able to reboot either. What I did not know is that they can't access the hardware, because there are other servers in the same chassis, so they can't fix it. Or even investigate further. Period. Nice service.

So pretty much killed dead.

mORMot is a general purpose Open Source library, which features some advanced cryptographic primitives. It is written in modern object pascal, with some assembly for its core process. It is used since years in several security-sensitive projects, and has been audited internally by at least one billion dollar company.

We already spoke about this a few years ago. In the meanwhile, the implementation details of our CSPRNG (Cryptographically Secure Pseudorandom Number Generator), as it is currently in the mORMot 2 repository, have been tuned and proven. Time to share some more information.

It is time for a new mORMot release!

OpenAPI, which was formerly called Swagger, is a set of specifications to encode the server API endpoints definitions into text, mostly JSON.
From this reference text, you can generate client code to access the service, in a vast number of languages.

Delphi seems to be far behind other languages, in terms of this code generation. I found nothing even working for FPC.
Since we needed it for our internal tools at Tranquil IT, we just published the new mormot.net.openapi.pas Open Source unit, which is quite a game changer. Thanks Andreas for starting this project, and testing it in its early age!

Last year 2023 was perhaps not the best ever, and, just after Christmas, we think about all people we know still in war or distress.
But in the small mORMot world, 2023 was a fine millesima. A lot of exciting features, a pretty good rank in benchmarks, and a proof of being ready for the next decade.

For this new year, we would like to introduce you to a new mORMot baby: the mget command line tool, a HTTP/HTTPS web client with peer-to-peer caching.
It is just a wrapper around a set of the new PeerCache feature, built-in the framework web client class - so you can use it in your own projects if you need to.

Round 22 of the TechEmpower Frameworks has just finished.
And this time, there was a pascal framework in the race: our little mORMot!

Numbers are quite good, because we are rated #12 among 302 frameworks over 791 runs of several configurations.

We are pleased to announce the release of mORMot 2.1.
The download link is available on github.

The mORMot family is growing up.

For most projects, we want to be able to pass some custom values when starting it.
The command line is then used to add this additional information.

We have ParamStr and ParamCount global functions, enough to retrieve the information. You may also use FindCmdLineSwitch for something more easy to work with.
The Lazarus RTL offers some additional methods like hasOption or getOptionValue or checkOptions in its TCustomApplication class. Their are better, but not so easy to use, and not available on Delphi.

We just committed a new command line parser to our Open Source mORMot 2 framework, which works on both Delphi and FPC, follows both Windows and POSIX/Linux conventions, and has much more features (like automated generation of the help message), in an innovative and easy workflow.

This is perhaps the last new feature of mORMot 2 before its first stable release: a very efficient custom URI routing for our HTTP/HTTPS servers.

At ORM and SOA level, there is by-convention routing of the URI, depending on the ORM table, SOA interface and method, and TOrmModel.Root value. Even for our MVC web part, we rely on a /root/ URI prefix, which may not be always needed.
Relying on convention is perfect between mORMot clients and servers, but in some cases, it may be handy to have something smoother, e.g. to publish a truly REST scheme.

We introduced two routing abilities to mORMot 2, with amazing performance (6-12 million parsings per CPU core), via a new THttpServerGeneric.Route property:

• Internal URI rewrite, to redirect internally from a human/REST-friendly request e.g. to a SOA /root/interface.method layout, or to a MVC web page;
• Direct callback execution, with optional parameter parsing.

Article edited on 28th December:
Fixed performance numbers (much higher than reported), and introduced latest source changes.