Synopse Open Source

2012-04-25

The mORMot attitude

By AB4327-GANDI, 2012-04-25. Open Source › mORMot Framework

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.

2012-04-20

WCF, mORMot and Event Sourcing

By AB4327-GANDI, 2012-04-20. Open Source › mORMot Framework

Our latest mORMot feature is interface-based service implementation.

How does it compare with the reference of SOA implementation (at least in the Windows world) - aka WCF?

"Comparaison n'est pas raison", as we use to say in France.
But we will also speak about Event Sourcing, and why it is now on our official road map.
Comparing our implementation with WCF is the opportunity to make our framework always better.

2012-04-19

Smart: mORMot, from Delphi to JavaScript

By AB4327-GANDI, 2012-04-19. Pascal Programming

Did you hear from the great Smart project?

It is an IDE and some source runtime able to develop and compile an Object-Pascal project into a HTML 5 / CSS 3 / JavaScript embedded application.
It does target AJAX Mobile application creation (i.e. Android and iPhone/iPad apps running Web-Kit).
You'll get an unique .html file containing the whole client-side application: it won't need any server side implementation. Using a third-party tool like PhoneGap, you'd be able to supply your customers with true native applications, running without any network, and accessing the full power of any modern Smart Phone.

Smart is a great candidate for implementing rich client-side AJAX applications, to work with our client-server mORMot framework.

In order to interface Smart code with mORMot, we started implementing some low-level code to work with our RESTful authentication scheme.

So we'll need to implement some Smart dedicated Open Source code implementing crc32 and SHA-256 hashing.

2012-04-13

Custom JSON serialization of any class

By AB4327-GANDI, 2012-04-13. Open Source › mORMot Framework

By default, our mORMot framework is able to serialize any class into a true JSON object.

All published properties will be written as JSON object members.

In some cases, it may be handy to have a custom serialization, for instance if you want to manage some third-party classes, or to adapt the serialization scheme to a particular purpose, at runtime.

2012-04-12

Custom JSON serialization of any dynamic array content

By AB4327-GANDI, 2012-04-12. Open Source › mORMot Framework

One nice feature of the TDynArray wrapper and its associated methods, as defined and used in our framework, is the ability to serialize any dynamic array as JSON content.

By default, only "standard" dynamic arrays (like TIntegerDynArray) are serialized as true JSON array: other not known kind of arrays are serialized as binary content, within a Base64 encoding.

This is a very efficient solution for a pure Delphi application, since it will be fast and always works, but won't be easy to deal with from an AJAX client.

Applications can now supply a custom JSON serialization for any other dynamic array, via the TTextWriter.RegisterCustomJSONSerializer() class method.
Two callbacks are to be supplied for a dynamic array type information, in order to handle proper serialization and un-serialization of the JSON array.

2012-04-10

How function results are allocated

By AB4327-GANDI, 2012-04-10. Pascal Programming

One potential issue with Delphi coding, is about how the result of a functions are implemented.

If you forget to set a result value to a function, you'll get a compiler warning.
Never underestimate such warning: IMHO this is not a warning, but an error.

And you should better be aware of the handling of reference-counted types (e.g. string) in a function results: those are passed the stack as var parameters, so the result of a function may be set even if an exception is raised during function execution!

2012-03-28

Return custom content from an interface-based service

By AB4327-GANDI, 2012-03-28. Open Source › mORMot Framework

As stated by this previous article, the default answer format is a valid JSON object.

In some cases, it may be useful to have a service operation (i.e. an interface method) returning any content, e.g. some plain TEXT, HTML or binary data (like a picture).

2012-03-07

Interface based services - sample code

By AB4327-GANDI, 2012-03-07. Open Source › mORMot Framework

In addition to the other related blog articles, you can find in the "

SQLite3/Samples/14
- Interface based services

" folder of the supplied source code distribution, a dedicated sample about this feature.

Purpose of this code is to show how to create a client-server service, using interfaces, over named pipe communication.