2016-02-08

Linux support for Delphi to be available end of 2016

Marco Cantu, product manager of Delphi/RAD Studio, did publish the official RAD Studio 2016 Product Approach and Roadmap.
The upcoming release has a codename known as "BigBen", and should be called Delphi 10.1 Berlin, as far as I understand.

After this summer, another release, which codename is "Godzilla", will support Linux as a compiler target, in its Delphi 10.2 Tokyo release.
This is a very good news, and some details are given.
I've included those official names to mORMot's internal compiler version detection.
Thanks Marco for the information, and pushing in this direction!

My only concern is that it would be "ARC-enabled"...

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2016-01-09

Safe locks for multi-thread applications

Once your application is multi-threaded, concurrent data access should be protected. We already wrote about how debugging multi-thread applications may be hard.
Otherwise, a "race condition" issue may appear: for instance, if two threads modify a variable at the same time (e.g. decrease a counter), values may become incoherent and unsafe to use. Another symptom of broken logic is the "deadlock", by which the whole application appears to be blocked and unresponsive, when two threads have a wrong use of the lock, so are blocking each-others.
On a server system, which is expected to run 24/7 with no maintenance, such issues are to be avoided.

In Delphi, protection of a resource (which may be an object, or any variable) is usually done via Critical Sections.
A critical section is an object used to make sure, that some part of the code is executed only by one thread at a time. A critical section needs to be created/initialized before it can be used and be released when it is not needed anymore. Then, some code is protected using Enter/Leave methods, which would lock its execution: in practice, only a single thread would own the critical section, so only a single thread would be able to execute this code section, and other threads would wait until the lock is released. For best performance, the protected sections should be as small as possible - otherwise the benefit of using threads may be voided, since any other thread would wait for the thread owning the critical section to release the lock.

We will now see that Delphi's TCriticalSection may have potential issues, and what our framework proposes to ease critical section use in your applications.

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2015-12-11

Audit Trail for Services

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.

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2015-11-21

Try to avoid RTTI (ab)use

There is a very trendy move, since a few years, to value so called "meta-programming".
In short, it is about the ability to treat programs as their data.
It is a very powerful paradigm in functional languages, and it was also introduced to OOP languages, even in SmallTalk a long time before this concept was trendy in Ruby, C# or Java.

In OOP compiled languages, reflection is used to achieve a similar behavior at run-time, mainly via RTTI (Run-Time Type Information).
Delphi supports RTTI since its version 1, as it was heavily used e.g. for all UI streaming.
In our framework, we rely on RTTI for its main features: ORMSOA and MVC - and even in some other parts, like Desktop UI generation.

But RTTI could easily be abused.
Here are some thoughts, started as a comment in a good old Mason's blog article about how RTTI performance may be a bottleneck.
My comment was to get rid of RTTI, and follow a SOLID implementation with explicit OOP code, like use of interface.

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2015-11-17

Benefits of interface callbacks instead of class messages

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...

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2015-10-23

Letters of Hope

As we already notified in this blog, Embarcadero has been finally bought by IDERA. Delphi users received a letter from Randy Jacops, IDERA CEO. Written in my mother language, in perfect French. Nice! The letter states that they have 20,000 customers... It sounds more realistic than the numbers  […]

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2015-10-05

Delphi 10 Seattle Win64 compiler Heisenbug: unusable target

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  […]

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2015-09-28

mORMot show case: Illustrated Spare Parts Catalog

Illustrated Spare Parts Catalog is, as its name suggests, a software for creating and publishing spare parts catalogs. It uses mORMot for client-server communication and ORM, and SynPdf for the reporting. Sounds like a powerful solution. It is also a testimony that you could use big databases (20 GB  […]

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