Tag - Delphi

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2015-09-14

Performance issue in NextGen ARC model - much better now

Back in 2013, I found out an implementation weakness in the implementation of ARC weak references in the RTL.
A giant lock was freezing all threads and cores, so would decrease a lot the performance abilities of any ARC application, especially in multi thread.

I just investigated that things are now better.

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2015-08-31

Delphi 10 = DX Seattle is out, mORMot supports it

We expected Delphi XE9, and now we have Rad Studio 10 Seattle, with Delphi renamed as Delphi 10 Seattle, or simply DX. No big news for the Delphi compiler itself (we are still waiting for Linux server support), but a lot of FireMonkey updates, Windows 10 compatibility enhancements, enhancements to  […]

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2015-08-24

Introducing Delphinus PackageManager

You may have missed the news. So I relay here the information from Delphinus PackageManager blog article. Delphinus is a new Package Manager, which runs on Delphi XE and newer, directly from within your IDE. It is GitHub-based, and fairly easy to add a reference to. Of course, I tried to add mORMot  […]

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2015-08-23

"SQL and NoSQL", not "SQL vs NoSQL"

You know certainly that our mORMot Open Source framework is an ORM, i.e. mapping objects to a relational / SQL database (Object Relational Mapping).
You may have followed also that it is able to connect to a NoSQL database, like MongoDB, and that the objects are then mapped via an ODM (Object Document Mapping) - the original SQL SELECT are even translated on the fly to MongoDB queries.

But thanks to mORMot, it is not "SQL vs NoSQL" - but "SQL and NoSQL".
You are not required to make an exclusive choice.
You can share best of both worlds, depending on your application needs.

In fact, the framework is able to add NoSQL features to a regular relational / SQL database, by storing JSON documents in TEXT columns.

In your end-user code, you just define a variant field in the ORM, and store a TDocVariant document within.
We also added some dedicated functions at SQL level, so that SQLite3 could be used as embedded fast engine, and provide advanced WHERE clauses on this JSON content.

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2015-08-15

Breaking Change in mORMot WebSockets binary protocol

Among all its means of transmission, our mORMot framework features WebSockets, allowing bidirectional communications, and interface-based callbacks for real time notification of SOA events.
After several months of use in production, we identified some needed changes for this just emerged feature.

We committed today a breaking change of the data layout used for our proprietary WebSockets binary protocol.
From our tests, it would increase the performance and decrease the resource consumption, especially in case of high number of messages.

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2015-07-14

New blog about mORMot

An enthusiastic mORMot user, named willo in the forum, just started a blog about his experiments with our framework.

The information there is clear, simple, and right to the point.
If you are a little lost in our huge documentation, it is a good place to start!

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2015-06-30

Faster String process using SSE 4.2 Text Processing Instructions STTNI

A lot of our code, and probably yours, is highly relying on text process. In our mORMot framework, most of its features use JSON text, encoded as UTF-8. Profiling shows that a lot of time is spent computing the end of a text buffer, or comparing text content. You may know that In its SSE4.2 feature  […]

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2015-06-21

Why FPC may be a better compiler than Delphi

Almost every time I'm debugging some core part of our framework, I like to see the generated asm, and trying to optimize the pascal code for better speed - when it is worth it, of course! I just made a nice observation, when comparing the assembler generated by Delphi to FPC's output. Imagine you  […]

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2015-06-16

Handling Cross-Platform Time Zones

One common problem when handling dates and times, is that time is shown and entered as local, whereas the computer should better use non-geographic information - especially on a Client-Server architecture, where both ends may not be on the same physical region.

A time zone is a region that observes a uniform standard time for legal, commercial, and social purposes.
Time zones tend to follow the boundaries of countries and their subdivisions because it is convenient for areas in close commercial or other communication to keep the same time.
Most of the time zones on land are offset from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) by a whole number of hours, or minutes.
Even worse, some countries use daylight saving time for part of the year, typically by changing clocks by an hour, twice every year.

The main rule is that any date and time stored should be stored in UTC, or with an explicit Zone identifier (i.e. an explicit offset to the UTC value).
Our framework expects this behavior: every date/time value stored and handled by the ORM, SOA, or any other part of it, is expected to be UTC-encoded.
At presentation layer (e.g. the User Interface), conversion to/from local times should take place, so that the end-user is provided with friendly clock-wall compatible timing.

As you may guess, handling time zones is a complex task, which should be managed by the Operating System itself.
Since this cultural material is constantly involving, it is updated as part of the OS.

In practice, current local time could be converted from UTC from the current system-wide time zone. One of the only parameters you have to set when installing an Operating System is to pickup the keyboard layout... and the current time zone to be used. But in a client-server environment, you may have to manage several time zones on the server side: so you can't rely on this global setting.

One sad - but predictable - news is that there is no common way of encoding time zone information.
Under Windows, the registry contains a list of time zones, and the associated time bias data. Most POSIX systems (including Linux and Mac OSX) do rely on the IANA database, also called tzdata - you may have noticed that this particular package is often updated with your system.
Both zone identifiers do not map, so our framework needed something to be shared on all systems.

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2015-06-06

GetIt "Spirit" Concerns

I'm confused by the GetIt Submitting official blog page. Reminds me the darker ages of Delphi licensing change of XE3. GetIt is the new XE8 package manager for RAD Studio. Information about how to submit your libraries to GetIt has just been made available by Embarcadero. The idea behind GetIt is  […]

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2015-06-01

Updated Slides about ORM SOA MVC SOLID DDD

One year ago, we published a set of slides about the main concepts implemented by our framework. Mainly about ORM (and ODM), NoSQL, JSON, SOA, MVC (and MVVM), SOLID, DDD, CQRS and some patterns like Stubs, Mocks, Factory, Repository, Unit-Of-Work. Worth a look, if you want to find out the benefits  […]

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2015-05-24

Introducing BeginEnd.net

Did you notice the new https://www.beginend.net web site, by Eric Grange? It is a blog feeds aggregator web site, dedicated to Delphi! It features: a maintained list of websites (including our very little blog); fast to load - thanks to good use of CDN; is not polluted by ads; nor breaking the links  […]

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2015-05-18

CQRS Persistence Service of any DDD object with mORMot

We introduced DDD concepts some time ago, in a series of articles in this blog. At that time, we proposed a simple way of using mORMot types to implement DDD in your applications. But all Domain Entitities being tied to the framework TSQLRecord class did appear as a limitation, breaking the  […]

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2015-05-14

Using TSynLog with a lot of threads? PYou should better upgrade your 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  […]

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2015-05-08

I do not like people shoot in my foot, do you?

There was some discussion about the new TStringHelper feature introduced in latest versions of Delphi.
I was told to be some kind of archaic guy, not able to see the benefit of this.
Reducing opinions to a conservative/progressive approach - another famous 10 kinds of coders - is very reductive.

Of course, this was IMHO unfair and my point was that I have the feeling that some decisions about the Delphi language and RTL are inadequate.
Some changes are welcome. I enjoy the introduction of generics - even if it is was painful, and even buggy (do not use TList<T> with managed record types in XE8!).
But some upcoming changes about the string policy - breaking everything just because we want to align with mainstream C# or Java habits - are just non sense to me.
I really think that Embarcadero deciders like to shoot their own foot.
Or - certainly worse - our own feet!

I will post here some part of the discussion...
So that we may be able to share our ideas.

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2015-05-03

SOLID Design Principles

Single-to-rule-them-all class

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.

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2015-04-20

Delphi is not a cross-compiler, but a set of cross-compilers

It is worth saying again.
I'm not speaking this time about performance issues, but about a common misunderstanding of what the latest version of Delphi offers.

Since Delphi "NextGen" compilers did break the memory model (introducing ARC), and also reducing low-level types (e.g. RawByteString/AnsiString), we can not say that Delphi is a single cross-compiler.
In practice, it has a set of cross-compilers.

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2015-04-12

Why Transmitting Exceptions in SOA services is not a good idea

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.

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2015-04-06

Asynchronous Service - WebSockets, Callbacks and Publish-Subscribe

When publishing SOA services, most of them are defined as stateless, in a typical query/answer pattern - see Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).
This fits exactly with the RESTful approach of Client-Server services via interfaces, as proposed by the framework.

But it may happen that a client application (or service) needs to know the state of a given service. In a pure stateless implementation, it will have to query the server for any state change, i.e. for any pending notification - this is called polling.

Polling may take place for instance:

  • When a time consuming work is to be processed on the server side. In this case, the client could not wait for it to be finished, without raising a timeout on the HTTP connection: as a workaround, the client may start the work, then ask for its progress status regularly using a timer and a dedicated method call;
  • When an unpredictable event is to be notified from the server side. In this case, the client should ask regularly (using a timer, e.g. every second), for any pending event, then react on purpose.

It may therefore sounds preferred, and in some case necessary, to have the ability to let the server notify one or several clients without any prior query, nor having the requirement of a client-side timer:

  • Polling may be pretty resource consuming on both client and server sides, and add some unwanted latency;
  • If immediate notification is needed, some kind of "long polling" algorithm may take place, i.e. the server will wait for a long time before returning the notification state if no event did happen: in this case, a dedicated connection is required, in addition to the REST one;
  • In an event-driven systems, a lot of messages are sent to the clients: a proper publish/subscribe mechanism is preferred, otherwise the complexity of polling methods may increase and become inefficient and unmaintainable;
  • Explicit push notifications may be necessary, e.g. when a lot of potential events, associated with a complex set of parameters, are likely to be sent by the client.

Our mORMot framework is therefore able to easily implement asynchronous callbacks over WebSockets, defining the callbacks as interface parameters in service method definitions - see Available types for methods parameters.

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Real-Time ORM Master/Slave Replication via WebSockets

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.

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