Synopse Open Source

We identified and fixed today several issues which may affect applications creating a lot of threads (i.e. not using a thread pool). The symptom was an unexpected access violation, when you reach a multiple of 256 threads count. You should better upgrade to at least revision 1.18.1351 if your  […]

I've just updated the documentation part about the SOLID Design Principles.
The former blog article (almost 4 years old!) sounds like a bit deprecated now...
This is why I would extract here an updated version of this material.

Ensure you checked the corresponding part of the mORMot documentation, which is the updated reference, and probably the easiest to read - including links to all the other documentation.

The acronym SOLID is derived from the following OOP principles (quoted from the corresponding Wikipedia article):

• Single responsibility principle: the notion that an object should have only a single responsibility;
• Open/closed principle: the notion that "software entities ... should be open for extension, but closed for modification";
• Liskov substitution principle: the notion that "objects in a program should be replaceable with instances of their subtypes without altering the correctness of that program” - also named as "design by contract";
• Interface segregation principle: the notion that "many client specific interfaces are better than one general purpose interface.";
• Dependency inversion principle: the notion that one should "Depend upon Abstractions. Do not depend upon concretions.". Dependency injection is one method of following this principle, which is also called Inversion Of Control (aka IoC).

If you have some programming skills, those principles are general statements you may already found out by yourself. If you start doing serious object-oriented coding, those principles are best-practice guidelines you would gain following.

They certainly help to fight the three main code weaknesses:

• Rigidity: Hard to change something because every change affects too many other parts of the system;
• Fragility: When you make a change, unexpected parts of the system break;
• Immobility: Hard to reuse in another application because it cannot be disentangled from the current application.

Usually, in Delphi application (like in most high-level languages), errors are handled via exceptions. By default, any Exception raised on the server side, within an interface-based service method, will be intercepted, and transmitted as an error to the client side, then a safe but somewhat obfuscated EInterfaceFactoryException will be raised on the client side, containing additional information serialized as JSON.

You may wonder why exceptions are not transmitted and raised directly on the client side, with our mORMot framework interface-based services, as if they were executed locally.

We will now detail some arguments, and patterns to be followed.

In a previous article, we presented how Master/Slave replication may be easily implemented in mORMot's RESTful ORM.
Do not forget to visit the corresponding paragraphs of our online documentation, which has been updated, and is more accurate!

Sometimes, the on-demand synchronization is not enough.
So we have just introduced real-time replication via WebSockets.
For instance, you may need to:

• Synchronize a short list of always evolving items which should be reflected as soon as possible;
• Involve some kind of ACID-like behavior (e.g. handle money!) in your replicated data;
• Replicate not from a GUI application, but from a service, so use of a TTimer is not an option;
• Combine REST requests (for ORM or services) and master/slave ORM replication on the same wire, e.g. in a multi-threaded application.

In this case, the framework is able to use WebSockets and asynchronous callbacks to let the master/slave replication - see Asynchronous callbacks - take place without the need to ask explicitly for pending data.
You would need to use TSQLRestServer.RecordVersionSynchronizeMasterStart, TSQLRestServer.RecordVersionSynchronizeSlaveStart and TSQLRestServer.RecordVersionSynchronizeSlaveStop methods over the proper kind of bidirectional connection.