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2024-02-01

IDocList/IDocDict JSON for Delphi and FPC

Since years, our Open Source mORMot framework offers several ways to work with any combination of arrays/objects documents defined at runtime, e.g. via JSON, with a lot of features, and very high performance.

Our TDocVariant custom variant type is a powerful way of working with such schema-less data, but it was found confusing by some users.
So we developed a new set of interface definitions around it, to ease its usage, without sacrificing its power. We modelized them around Python Lists and Dictionaries, which is proven ground - with some extensions of course.

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2024-01-01

Happy New Year 2024 and Welcome MGET

Last year 2023 was perhaps not the best ever, and, just after Christmas, we think about all people we know still in war or distress.
But in the small mORMot world, 2023 was a fine millesima. A lot of exciting features, a pretty good rank in benchmarks, and a proof of being ready for the next decade.

For this new year, we would like to introduce you to a new mORMot baby: the mget command line tool, a HTTP/HTTPS web client with peer-to-peer caching.
It is just a wrapper around a set of the new PeerCache feature, built-in the framework web client class - so you can use it in your own projects if you need to.

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2023-12-09

Native X.509, RSA and HSM Support

Today, almost all computer security relies on asymmetric cryptography and X.509 certificates as file or hardware modules.
And the RSA algorithm is still used to sign the vast majority of those certificates. Even if there are better options (like ECC-256), RSA-2048 seems the actual standard, at least still allowed for a few years.

So we added pure pascal RSA cryptography and X.509 certificates support in mORMot.
Last but not least, we also added Hardware Security Modules support via the PKCS#11 standard.
Until now, we were mostly relying on OpenSSL, but a native embedded solution would be smaller in code size, better for reducing dependencies, and easier to work with (especially for HSM). The main idea is to offer only safe algorithms and methods, so that you can write reliable software, even if you are no cryptographic expert. :)

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2023-10-31

Pascal In The Race: TFB Challenge Benchmarks

Round 22 of the TechEmpower Frameworks has just finished.
And this time, there was a pascal framework in the race: our little mORMot!

Numbers are quite good, because we are rated #12 among 302 frameworks over 791 runs of several configurations.

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2023-08-24

mORMot 2.1 Released

We are pleased to announce the release of mORMot 2.1.
The download link is available on github.

The mORMot family is growing up. :)

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2023-07-20

The LUTI and the mORMot

RegressTests.png, Jul 2023

Since its earliest days, our mORMot framework did offer extensive regression tests. In fact, it is fully test-driven, and almost 78 million individual tests are performed to cover all its abilities:

RegressTests.png, Jul 2023

We just integrated those tests to the TranquilIT build farm, and its great LUTI tool. So we have now continuous integration tests over several versions of Windows, Linux, and even Mac!
LUTI is the best mORMot's friends these days. :)

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2023-05-05

New DNS and (C)LDAP Clients for Delphi and FPC in mORMot 2

DNS and LDAP are the two protocols on which the Internet and the Intranet are built.
Most of the time, you don't have to care about them. But sometimes, you need to access them directly, especially in a corporate environment.

We just introduced in our Open Source mORMot 2 framework two client units to access DNS and LDAP/CLDAP servers.
You can resolve IP addresses and services using DNS, and ask for information about your IT infrastructure using LDAP.

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2023-04-19

New Command Line Parser in mORMot 2

For most projects, we want to be able to pass some custom values when starting it.
The command line is then used to add this additional information.

We have ParamStr and ParamCount global functions, enough to retrieve the information. You may also use FindCmdLineSwitch for something more easy to work with.
The Lazarus RTL offers some additional methods like hasOption or getOptionValue or checkOptions in its TCustomApplication class. Their are better, but not so easy to use, and not available on Delphi.

We just committed a new command line parser to our Open Source mORMot 2 framework, which works on both Delphi and FPC, follows both Windows and POSIX/Linux conventions, and has much more features (like automated generation of the help message), in an innovative and easy workflow.

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2023-01-10

mORMot 2 Release Candidate

The mORMot 2 framework is about to be released as its first 2.0 stable version.

The framework feature set should now be considered as sealed for this release.
There is no issue reported still open at github or in the forum.

Please test it, and give here some feedback to fix any problem before the actual release!
We enter a framework code-freeze phase until then.
:-)

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2022-12-28

Efficient Routing for Christmas

This is perhaps the last new feature of mORMot 2 before its first stable release: a very efficient custom URI routing for our HTTP/HTTPS servers.

At ORM and SOA level, there is by-convention routing of the URI, depending on the ORM table, SOA interface and method, and TOrmModel.Root value. Even for our MVC web part, we rely on a /root/ URI prefix, which may not be always needed.
Relying on convention is perfect between mORMot clients and servers, but in some cases, it may be handy to have something smoother, e.g. to publish a truly REST scheme.

We introduced two routing abilities to mORMot 2, with amazing performance (6-12 million parsings per CPU core), via a new THttpServerGeneric.Route property:

  • Internal URI rewrite, to redirect internally from a human/REST-friendly request e.g. to a SOA /root/interface.method layout, or to a MVC web page;
  • Direct callback execution, with optional parameter parsing.

Article edited on 28th December:
Fixed performance numbers (much higher than reported), and introduced latest source changes.

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2022-08-12

New Client for MongoDB 5.1/6 Support

Starting with its version 5.1, MongoDB disabled the legacy protocol used for communication since its beginning.
As a consequence, our mORMot client was not able to communicate any more with the latest versions of MongoDB instances.

Last week, we made a deep rewrite of mormot.db.nosql.mongodb.pas, which changed the default protocol to use the new layout on the wire. Now messages use regular MongoDB Database Commands, with automated compression if needed.

No change is needed in your end-user MongoDB or ORM/ODM code. The upgrade is as simple as update your mORMot 2 source, then recompile.

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2022-07-09

Native TLS Support for mORMot 2 REST or WebSockets Servers

Since the beginning, we delegated the TLS encryption support to a reverse proxy server, mainly Nginx. Under Windows, you could setup the http.sys HTTPS layer as usual, as a native - even a bit complicated - solution.
Nginx has several advantages, the first being a proven and efficient technology, with plenty of documentation and configuration tips. It interfaces nicely with Let's Encrypt, and is very good for any regular website, using static content and PHP. This very blog and the Synopse web site is hosted via Ngnix on a small Linux server.

But in mORMot 2, we introduced a new set of asynchronous web server classes. So stability and performance are not a problem any more. Some benchmarks even consider this server to be faster than nginx (the stability issue mentioned in this post has been fixed in-between).
We just introduced TLS support of our socket-based servers, both the blocking and asynchronous classes. It would use OpenSSL if available, or the SChannel API layer of Windows. Serving HTTPS or WSS with a self-signed certificate is just a matter of a single parameter now, and performance seems pretty good, especially with OpenSSL.

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2022-05-21

New Async HTTP/WebSocket Server on mORMot 2

The HTTP server is one main part of any SOA/REST service, by design.
It is the main entry point of all incoming requests. So it should better be stable and efficient. And should be able to scale in the future, if needed.

There have always been several HTTP servers in mORMot. You can use the HTTP server class you need.
In mORMot 2, we added two new server classes, one for publishing over HTTP, another able to upgrade to WebSockets. The main difference is that they are fully event-driven, so their thread pool is able to scale with thousands of concurrent connections, with a fixed number of threads. They are a response to the limitations of our previous socket server.

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2022-02-15

mORMot 2 ORM Performance

The official release of mORMot 2 is around the edge. It may be the occasion to show some data persistence performance numbers, in respect to mORMot 1.

For the version 2 of our framework, its ORM feature has been enhanced and tuned in several aspects: REST routing optimization, ORM/JSON serialization, and in-memory and SQL engines tuning. Numbers are talking. You could compare with any other solution, and compile and run the tests by yourself for both framework, and see how it goes on your own computer or server.
In a nutshell, we almost reach 1 million inserts per second on SQLite3, and are above the million inserts in our in-memory engine. Reading speed is 1.2 million and 1.7 million respectively. From the object to the storage, and back. And forcing AES-CTR encryption on disk almost don't change anything. Now we are talking. ;)

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2022-01-22

Three Locks To Rule Them All

To ensure thread-safety, especially on server side, we usually protect code with critical sections, or locks. In recent Delphi revisions, we have the TMonitor feature, but I would rather trust the OS for locks, which are implemented using Windows Critical Sections, or POSIX futex/mutex.

But all locks are not born equal. Most of the time, the overhead of a Critical Section WinAPI or the pthread library is not needed.
So, in mORMot 2, we introduced several native locks in addition to those OS locks, with multi-read/single-write abilities, or re-entrancy.

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2021-12-19

mORMot 2 Generics and Collections

Generics are a clever way of writing some code once, then reuse it for several types.
They are like templates, or compiler-time shortcuts for type definitions.

In the last weeks, we added a new mormot.core.collections.pas unit, which features:

  • JSON-aware IList<> List Storage;
  • JSON-aware IKeyValue<> Dictionary Storage.

In respect to Delphi or FPC RTL generics.collections, this unit uses interfaces as variable holders, and leverage them to reduce the generated code as much as possible, as the Spring4D 2.0 framework does, but for both Delphi and FPC. It publishes TDynArray and TSynDictionary high-level features like indexing, sorting, JSON/binary serialization or thread safety as Generics strong typing.

Resulting performance is great, especially for its enumerators, and your resulting executable size won't blow up as with the regular RTL unit.

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2021-11-16

EKON 25 Slides

EKON 25 at Düsseldorf was a great conference (konference?).

At last, a physical gathering of Delphi developers, mostly from Germany, but also from Europe - and even some from USA! No more virtual meetings, which may trigger the well known 'Abstract Error' on modern pascal coders.
There were some happy FPC users too - as I am now. :)

I have published the slides of my conferences, mostly about mORMot 2.
By the way, I wish we would be able to release officially mORMot 2 in December, before Christmas. I think it starts to be stabilized and already known to be used on production. We expect no more breaking change in the next weeks.

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2021-09-21

Delphi 10.4 / Delphi 11 Alexandria Breaking Changes

The latest revision of Delphi, named Delphi 11 Alexandria, is out.
A lot of new features, some enhanced platforms. Nice!
But it is also for us the opportunity to come back to some breaking changes, which appeared in Delphi 10.4 earlier this year, and are now "officially" part of Delphi 11.

The main breaking change of Delphi 10.4 and later, as reported by mORMot users, is the new lifetime of local variables.
TL&LR: a local variable which is not explicitly declared, but returned by a function may be released as soon as it is not used any more, whereas in the original implementation, it was allocated as a regular local variable, and we could expect its lifetime to remain active up to the end of the function. With Delphi 10.4, it is not the case any more: the compiler could release/clear the local variable sooner, to reduce the allocation pressure.

Idea behind this change is that it may have better register allocation within the function, so it "may" theoretically result in faster code. Not convinced about it, anyway - we will discuss that.
The main thing is that it could break existing code, because it breaks the Delphi compiler expectation since decades.
Some perfectly fine working code would end to work as expected. We have identified several use cases with mORMot which are affected by this change. Since it seems there will be no coming back from Delphi point of view, it is worth a blog article. ;)

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2021-08-17

mORMot 2 on Ampere AARM64 CPU

Last weeks, we have enhanced mORMot support to one of the more powerful AARM64 CPU available: the Ampere Altra CPU, as made available on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Long story short, this is an amazing hardware to run on server side, with performance close to what Intel/AMD offers, but with almost linear multi-core scalability. The FPC compiler is able to run good code on it, and our mORMot 2 library is able to use the hardware accelerated opcodes for AES, SHA2, and crc32/crc32c.

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2021-06-26

Embed Small and Optimized Debug Information for FPC

Debug information can be generated by compilers, to contain symbols and source code lines. This is very handy to have a meaningful stack trace on any problems like exceptions, at runtime.

The problem is that debug information can be huge. New code style with generics tends to increase this size into a bloated way...
On Delphi, mormot2tests generates a 4MB .map file;
on FPC, mormot2tests outputs a 20MB .dbg file in DWARF.

For Delphi, we propose our own binary .mab format which reduces this 4MB .map file into a 290KB .mab file since mORMot 1.
Now mORMot 2 can reduce a FPC debug file of 20MB into a 322KB .mab file!
And this .mab information can just be appended to the executable for single-file distribution, if needed, during the build. No need to distribute two files, potentially with synchronization issues.

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