- June 2013 -

June 2013 (5)

2013-06-21

SynPDF now generates (much) smaller PDF file size

By AB4327-GANDI, 2013-06-21. Open Source › Synopse PDF engine

We have reduced PDF generated file size for all version of the PDF format, by trimming any uneeded space in the generated content.

We introduced a new optional PDFGeneratePDF15File property for even better compression, using advanced features (Object Streams and Cross-Reference Streams) of the PDF 1.5 format.
This PDF 1.5 format needs Acrobot 6.0 and up to open them.
Which should be the case on your computer.

Can be up to 70% smaller for a pdf with a lot of pages with simple textual context.

I suspect our library is able to generate the smallest file size possible, even in regard to other alternative libraries.
Open Source can be great, can't it?

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2013-06-19

SynPDF now implements 40 bit and 128 bit security

By AB4327-GANDI, 2013-06-19. Open Source › Synopse PDF engine

The trunk version of our Open Source SynPdf library now features encryption using 40 bit or 128 bit key size.

This is a long awaiting feature, and sounds working just fine from my tests.
Speed has been optimized (as usual with our libraries), as a consequence encrypting the content will only be slightly slower.

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2013-06-16

FireDAC / AnyDAC support for mORMot

By AB4327-GANDI, 2013-06-16. Open Source › mORMot Framework

Our SynDB classes feature now FireDAC / AnyDAC access, with full speed!

Up to now, only UniDAC, BDE or ZEOS components were available as source, but we just added FireDAC / AnyDAC.

FireDAC is an unique set of Universal Data Access Components for developing cross platform database applications on Delphi. This was in fact a third-party component set, bought by Embarcadero to DA-SOFT Technologies (formerly known as AnyDAC), and included with several editions of Delphi XE3 and up. This is the new official platform for high-speed database development in Delphi, in favor to the now deprecated DBExpress.

Our integration within SynDB.pas units and the mORMot persistence layer has been tuned. For instance, you can have direct access to high-speed FireDAC Array DML feature, via the ORM batch process, via so-called array binding.

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2013-06-14

SQLite3 performance in Exclusive file locking mode

By AB4327-GANDI, 2013-06-14. Open Source › mORMot Framework

As stated in previous blog articles, the default SQlite3 write speed is quite slow, when running on a normal hard drive. By default, the engine will pause after issuing a OS-level write command. This guarantees that the data is written to the disk, and features the ACID properties of the database engine.

ACID is an acronym for "Atomicity Consistency Isolation Durability" properties, which guarantee that database transactions are processed reliably: for instance, in case of a power loss or hardware failure, the data will be saved on disk in a consistent way, with no potential loss of data.

In SQLite3, ACID is implemented by two means at file level:
- Synchronous writing: it means that the engine will wait for any written content to be flushed to disk before processing the next request;
- File locking: it means that the database file is locked for exclusive use during writing, allowing several processes to access the same database file concurrently.

Changing these default settings can ensure much better writing performance.

We just added direct File locking tuning.
It appears that defining exclusive access mode is able to increase the performance a lot, in both reading and writing speed.

Here are some new benchmarks and data, extracted from the updated SAD documentation.

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2013-06-07

Authentication and Authorization

By AB4327-GANDI, 2013-06-07. Open Source › mORMot Framework

Our mORMot framework tries to implement security via:
- Process safety;
- Authentication;
- Authorization.

Process safety is implemented at every n-Tier level:
- Atomicity of the SQLite3 database core;
- RESTful architecture to avoid most synchronization issues;
- ORM associated to the Object pascal strong type syntax;
- Extended test coverage of the framework core.

Authentication allows user identification:
- Build-in optional authentication mechanism, implementing both per-user sessions and individual REST Query Authentication;
- Authentication groups are used for proper authorization;
- Several authentication schemes, from very secure SHA-256 based challenging to weak but simple authentication;
- Class-based architecture, allowing custom extension.

Authorization of a given process is based on the group policy, after proper authentication:
- Per-table access right functionalities built-in at lowest level of the framework;
- Per-method execution policy for interface-based services;
- General high-level security attributes, for SQL or Service remote execution.

We will now give general information about both authentication and authorization in the framework.

In particular, authentication is now implemented via a set of classes.

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- June 2013 -