Synopse Open Source

Even if mORMot will be more easily used in a project designed from scratch, it fits very well the purpose of evolving any existing Delphi project, or even creating the server side part of an AJAX application. 

One benefit of such a framework is to facilitate the transition from a Client-Server architecture to a N-Tier layered pattern.

(this is an update of the article published in 2011/07)

For our mORMot framework, and in completion to our SynOleDB unit, we added a new Open Source unit, named SynDBOracle. It allows direct access to any remote Oracle server, using the Oracle Call Interface.

Oracle Call Interface (OCI) is the most comprehensive, high performance, native unmanaged interface to the Oracle Database that exposes the full power of the Oracle Database. We wrote a direct call of the oci.dll library, using our DB abstraction classes introduced for SynOleDB.

We tried to implement all best-practice patterns detailed in the official Building High Performance Drivers for Oracle document

Resulting speed is quite impressive: for all requests, SynDBOracle is 3 to 5 times faster than a SynOleDB connection using the native OleDB Provider supplied by Oracle. We noted also that our implementation is 10 times faster than the one provided with ZEOS/ZDBC, which is far from optimized.

You can use the latest version of the Oracle Instant Client provided by Oracle - see this link - which allows you to run your applications without installing the standard (huge) Oracle client or having an ORACLE_HOME. Just deliver the dll files in the same directory than your application, and it will work.

Our Open Source mORMot framework is now available in revision 1.17.

The main new features are the following:

• Direct ODBC support, with any edition of Delphi - even the Starter edition;
• Array DML support for very fast insertion with Oracle;
• SQLite3 engine updated to latest revision 3.7.14, including Delphi 5 compiler support;
• Performance enhancements, especially for external databases and our very fast in-memory engine (e.g. for unique properties, or with SQlite3 writing speed), with a new included benchmark tool;
• Breaking use change for *FillPrepare() methods;
• Better Unicode support in report and pdf generation (e.g. font-fallback is now implemented);
• TDataSet available for SynDB units;
• A lot of fixes and improvements.

We have some very exciting features on the road-map for the next 1.18 release, like direct Event/CallBacks handling.
Stay tuned!

By default, both GDI+ anti-aliased drawing and PDF file generation using our libraries did lack of font-fallback implementation.

If some of the characters in a string are not supported in a requested font, they were drawn as square symbols on the GDI+ canvas or the PDF content.

The font-fallback mechanism implemented will use a third-party font (Arial Unicode MS by default, which is installed with Microsoft Office), for any glyph that are missing when rendering the content. Of course, for PDF generation, you are able to embed the font within the generated file (this is by the way mandatory for PDF/A-1 format).

Both of these new features are handled by the SQlite3Pages unit, i.e. for report anti-aliased drawing preview and PDF generation.

By the way, the TGDIPages class itself (the one used for report generation from code) now handles by default Unicode text, even with Delphi versions prior to 2009 (via the SynUnicode string type, which maps WideString before Delphi 2009, then UnicodeString starting with Delphi 2009). Does make sense with such a font-fallback mechanism.

Our Client-Server ORM framework is now available in revision 1.15.

This is a major upgrade of the framework:

• It is now called mORMot - so please update your T-Shirts or coffee cups
• It is able to use any Database engine back-end - in fact, it is SQLite3 powered, not SQLite3 limited;
• In particular, direct OleDB and native Oracle have been implemented;
• It makes use of the genuine SQlite3 Virtual Table mechanism everywhere to allow mixed access to any database engine;
• New TModTime / TCreateTime kind of fields;
• Enhanced stability, speed and multi-thread implementation;
• Methods and functions have been enhanced, according to user feedback (thanks you all for your interest and forum posts!);
• Extended documentation (more than 700 pdf pages), with new diagrams and a lot of new content;
• New associated tools, like LogViewer or SynDBExplorer;
• The SQLite3 core can now be used without our ORM - it has been updated to the latest 3.7.8 version;
• Open Source (under GPL/LGPL/MPL license), running from Delphi 6 up to XE2.

Article update:
The server side call back signature changed since this article was first published in 2010. 
Please refer to the documentation or this forum article and associated commit.
The article was totally rewritten to reflect the enhancements.
And do not forget to see mORMot's interface-based services!

Note that the main difference with previous implementation is the signature of the service implementation event, which should be now exactly:
procedure MyService(Ctxt: TSQLRestServerURIContext);
(note that there is one unique class parameter, with no var specifier)
Please update your code if you are using method-based services!

You certainly knows about the new DataSnap Client-Server features, based on JSON, introduced in Delphi 2010.
http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudi … plications

We added such communication in our mORmot Framework, in a KISS (i.e. simple) way: no expert, no new unit or new class. Just add a published method Server-side, then use easy functions about JSON or URL-parameters to get the request encoded and decoded as expected, on Client-side.

Our ORM RESTful Framework is about to access any available database engine.

It will probably change its name (since it won't use only SQlite3 as database), to become mORMot - could be an acronym for "Manage Object Relational Mapping Over Tables", or whatever you may think of...

We'll still rely on SQLite3 on the server, but a dedicated mechanism will allow to access via OleDB any remote database, and mix those tables content with the native ORM tables of the framework. A flexible Virtual Tables and column mapping will allow any possible architecture: either a new project in pure ORM, either a project relying on an existing database with its own table layout.

Our SynPdf unit has been updated to the 1.14 version. Some enhancements: new SetCMYKFillColor and SetCMYKStrokeColor methods for TPdfCanvas now handles EMR_POLYBEZIER* commands in conversion from meta file content fixed EZeroDivided error when enumerating SetWindowExtEx(szlExtent(0,0)) some  […]

Our SynPdf unit has been refreshed to the 1.13 version.

• code modifications to compile with Delphi 5 compiler;
• added horizontal scaling for GDI enumeration in case of text kerning (could occur for small fonts);
• fixed "Save when closing with Acrobat Reader X" - thanks to Ondrej for the fix;
• fixed clipping problems and vertical font positioning issue in GDI enumeration - thanks to Ondrej for those corrections!

Synopse SynProject is an open source (GPL) application for code source versioning and automated documentation of Delphi projects.

It has been updated to version 1.12.

Main enhancement of this update (among various fixes or new commands) is the generation of vectorial diagrams for all documents, for better rendering than PNG or JPEG.