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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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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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2016-04-22

Support of Delphi 10.1 Berlin

You should have noticed that Delphi 10.1 Berlin has been released. Our Open Source projects, including mORMot and SynPDF and their associated documentation have been updated to support this new revision. Any additional feedback is welcome, as usual!

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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2015-06-06

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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2015-01-10

mORMot under Linux thanks to FPC

You can use the FreePascal Compiler (FPC) to compile the mORMot framework source code, targetting Windows and Linux.

Linux is a premium target for cheap and efficient server Hosting. Since mORMot has no dependency, installing a new mORMot server is as easy as copying its executable on a blank Linux host, then run it. No need to install any framework nor runtime. You could even use diverse operating systems (several Linux or Windows Server versions) in your mORMot servers farm, with minimal system requirements, and updates.

We will now see how to write your software with Linux-compiling in mind, and also give some notes about how to install a Linux Virtual Machine with Lazarus on your Windows computer, compiling both FPC and Lazarus from their SVN latest sources!

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2014-11-18

HTTP remote access for SynDB SQL execution

For mORMot, we developed a fully feature direct access layer to any RDBMS, implemented in the SynDB.pas unit.

You can use those SynDB classes to execute any SQL statement, without any link to the framework ORM.
At reading, the resulting performance is much higher than using the standard TDataSet component, which is in fact a true performance bottleneck.
It has genuine features, like column access via late-binding, an innovative ISQLDBRows interface, and ability to directly access the low-level binary buffers of the database clients.

We just added a nice feature to those classes: the ability to access remotely, via plain HTTP, to any SynDB supported database!

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2014-10-24

MVC/MVVM Web Applications

We almost finished implementing a long-standing feature request, introducing MVC / MVVM for Web Applications (like RubyOnRails) in mORMot.
This is a huge step forward, opening new perspectives not only to our framework, but for the Delphi community.
In respect to the existing MVC frameworks for Delphi, our  solution is closer to Delphi On Rails (by the convention-over-configuration pattern) than the Delphi MVC Framework or XMM.
The mORMot point of view is unique, and quite powerful, since it is integrated with other parts of our framework, as its ORM/ODM or interface-based services.
Of course, this is a work in progress, so you are welcome to put your feedback, patches or new features!

We will now explain how to build a MVC/MVVM web application using mORMot, starting from the "30 - MVC Server" sample.
First of all, check the source in our GitHub repository: two .pas files, and a set of minimalist Mustache views.

This little web application publishes a simple BLOG, not fully finished yet (this is a Sample, remember!).
But you can still execute it in your desktop browser, or any mobile device (thanks to a simple Bootstrap-based responsive design), and see the articles list, view one article and its comments, view the author information, log in and out.

This sample is implemented as such:

MVVM Source mORMot
Model MVCModel.pas TSQLRestServerDB ORM over a SQlite3 database
View *.html Mustache template engine in the Views sub-folder
ViewModel MVCViewModel.pas Defined as one IBlogApplication interface

For the sake of the simplicity, the sample will create some fake data in its own local SQlite3 database, the first time it is executed.

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2014-08-11

Cross-Platform mORMot Clients - Smart Mobile Studio

Current version of the main framework units target only Win32 and Win64 systems.

It allows to make easy self-hosting of mORMot servers for local business applications in any corporation, or pay cheap hosting in the Cloud, since mORMot CPU and RAM expectations are much lower than a regular IIS-WCF-MSSQL-.Net stack.
But in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), you would probably need to create clients for platforms outside the Windows world, especially mobile devices.

A set of cross-platform client units is therefore available in the CrossPlatform sub-folder of the source code repository. It allows writing any client in modern object pascal language, for:

  • Any version of Delphi, on any platform (Mac OSX, or any mobile supported devices);
  • FreePascal Compiler 2.7.1;
  • Smart Mobile Studio 2.1, to create AJAX or mobile applications (via PhoneGap, if needed).

This series of articles will introduce you to mORMot's Cross-Platform abilities:

Any feedback is welcome in our forum, as usual!

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Cross-Platform mORMot Clients - Delphi / FreePascal

Current version of the main framework units target only Win32 and Win64 systems.

It allows to make easy self-hosting of mORMot servers for local business applications in any corporation, or pay cheap hosting in the Cloud, since mORMot CPU and RAM expectations are much lower than a regular IIS-WCF-MSSQL-.Net stack.
But in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), you would probably need to create clients for platforms outside the Windows world, especially mobile devices.

A set of cross-platform client units is therefore available in the CrossPlatform sub-folder of the source code repository. It allows writing any client in modern object pascal language, for:

  • Any version of Delphi, on any platform (Mac OSX, or any mobile supported devices);
  • FreePascal Compiler 2.7.1;
  • Smart Mobile Studio 2.1, to create AJAX or mobile applications (via PhoneGap, if needed).

This series of articles will introduce you to mORMot's Cross-Platform abilities:

Any feedback is welcome in our forum, as usual!

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Cross-Platform mORMot Clients - Generating Code Wrappers

Current version of the main framework units target only Win32 and Win64 systems.

It allows to make easy self-hosting of mORMot servers for local business applications in any corporation, or pay cheap hosting in the Cloud, since mORMot CPU and RAM expectations are much lower than a regular IIS-WCF-MSSQL-.Net stack.
But in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), you would probably need to create clients for platforms outside the Windows world, especially mobile devices.

A set of cross-platform client units is therefore available in the CrossPlatform sub-folder of the source code repository. It allows writing any client in modern object pascal language, for:

  • Any version of Delphi, on any platform (Mac OSX, or any mobile supported devices);
  • FreePascal Compiler 2.7.1;
  • Smart Mobile Studio 2.1, to create AJAX or mobile applications (via PhoneGap, if needed).

This series of articles will introduce you to mORMot's Cross-Platform abilities:

Any feedback is welcome in our forum, as usual!

Continue reading

Cross-Platform mORMot Clients - Units and Platforms

Current version of the main framework units target only Win32 and Win64 systems.

It allows to make easy self-hosting of mORMot servers for local business applications in any corporation, or pay cheap hosting in the Cloud, since mORMot CPU and RAM expectations are much lower than a regular IIS-WCF-MSSQL-.Net stack.
But in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), you would probably need to create clients for platforms outside the Windows world, especially mobile devices.

A set of cross-platform client units is therefore available in the CrossPlatform sub-folder of the source code repository. It allows writing any client in modern object pascal language, for:

  • Any version of Delphi, on any platform (Mac OSX, or any mobile supported devices);
  • FreePascal Compiler 2.7.1;
  • Smart Mobile Studio 2.1, to create AJAX or mobile applications (via PhoneGap, if needed).

This series of articles will introduce you to mORMot's Cross-Platform abilities:

Any feedback is welcome in our forum, as usual!

Continue reading

2014-05-25

New crc32c() function using optimized asm and SSE 4.2 instruction

Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) codes are widely used for integrity checking of data in fields such as storage and networking.
There is an ever-increasing need for very high-speed CRC computations on processors for end-to-end integrity checks.

We just introduced to mORMot's core unit (SynCommons.pas) a fast and efficient crc32c() function.

It will use either:

  • Optimized x86 asm code, with unrolled loops;
  • SSE 4.2 hardware crc32 instruction, if available.

Resulting speed is very good.
This is for sure the fastest CRC function available in Delphi.
Note that there is a version dedicated to each Win32 and Win64 platform - both performs at the same speed!

In fact, most popular file formats and protocols (Ethernet, MPEG-2, ZIP, RAR, 7-Zip, GZip, and PNG) use the polynomial $04C11DB7, while Intel's hardware implementation is based on another polynomial, $1EDC6F41 (used in iSCSI and Btrfs).
So you would not use this new crc32c() function to replace the zlib's crc32() function, but as a convenient very fast hashing function at application level.
For instance, our TDynArray wrapper will use it for fast items hashing.

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2014-05-07

MongoDB + mORMot benchmark

Here are some benchmark charts about MongoDB integration in mORMot's ORM.

MongoDB appears as a serious competitor to SQL databases, with the potential benefit of horizontal scaling and installation/administration ease - performance is very high, and its document-based storage fits perfectly with mORMot's advanced ORM features like Shared nothing architecture (or sharding).

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MongoDB + mORMot ORM = ODM

MongoDB (from "humongous") is a cross-platform document-oriented database system, and certainly the best known NoSQL database.
According to http://db-engines.com in April 2014, MongoDB is in 5th place of the most popular types of database management systems, and first place for NoSQL database management systems.
Our mORMot gives premium access to this database, featuring full NoSQL and Object-Document Mapping (ODM) abilities to the framework.

Integration is made at two levels:

  • Direct low-level access to the MongoDB server, in the SynMongoDB.pas unit;
  • Close integration with our ORM (which becomes defacto an ODM), in the mORMotMongoDB.pas unit.

MongoDB eschews the traditional table-based relational database structure in favor of JSON-like documents with dynamic schemas (MongoDB calls the format BSON), which matches perfectly mORMot's RESTful approach.

This second article will focus on integration of MongoDB with our ORM.

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Direct MongoDB database access

MongoDB (from "humongous") is a cross-platform document-oriented database system, and certainly the best known NoSQL database.
According to http://db-engines.com in April 2014, MongoDB is in 5th place of the most popular types of database management systems, and first place for NoSQL database management systems.
Our mORMot framework gives premium access to this database, featuring full NoSQL and Object-Document Mapping (ODM) abilities to the framework.

Integration is made at two levels:

  • Direct low-level access to the MongoDB server, in the SynMongoDB.pas unit;
  • Close integration with our ORM (which becomes defacto an ODM), in the mORMotMongoDB.pas unit.

MongoDB eschews the traditional table-based relational database structure in favor of JSON-like documents with dynamic schemas (MongoDB calls the format BSON), which matches perfectly mORMot's RESTful approach.

In this first article, we will detail direct low-level access to the MongoDB server, via the SynMongoDB.pas unit.

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2014-05-02

mORMot on GitHub

There was a long-standing request from customers, about putting all our source code repository to GitHub.

We like a lot our self-hosted Fossil repository, and will continue to use it as our main system, including issue tracking and wiki, for our official web site.

But we created a repository on GitHub, on https://github.com/synopse/mORMot

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2014-04-28

Mustache Logic-less templates for Delphi - part 3

Mustache is a well-known logic-less template engine.
There is plenty of Open Source implementations around (including in JavaScript, which can be very convenient for AJAX applications on client side, for instance).
For mORMot, we created the first pure Delphi implementation of it, with a perfect integration with other bricks of the framework.

In last part of this series of blog articles, we will introduce the Mustache library included within mORMot source code tree.
You can download this documentation as one single pdf file.

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Mustache Logic-less templates for Delphi - part 2

Mustache is a well-known logic-less template engine.
There is plenty of Open Source implementations around (including in JavaScript, which can be very convenient for AJAX applications on client side, for instance).
For mORMot, we created the first pure Delphi implementation of it, with a perfect integration with other bricks of the framework.

In this second part of this series of blog articles, we will introduce the Mustache syntax.
You can download this documentation as one single pdf file.

Continue reading

Mustache Logic-less templates for Delphi - part 1

Mustache is a well-known logic-less template engine.
There is plenty of Open Source implementations around (including in JavaScript, which can be very convenient for AJAX applications on client side, for instance).
For mORMot, we created the first pure Delphi implementation of it, with a perfect integration with other bricks of the framework.

In this first part of this series of blog articles, we will introduce the Mustache design.
You can download this documentation as one single pdf file.

Continue reading

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