Tag - Synopse

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2020-07-02

mORMot on GitHub Sponsors

We just enrolled on GitHub Sponsors!

Aim is to allow proper evolution of our Open Source project, especially the upcoming mORMot2.

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2020-03-03

Preparing Revision 2.x of the mORMot Framework

The more I think of it, the more I am convinced it is time to change how the framework is versioned.
We have version 1.18 since years... difficult to follow... time to upgrade!


I would like to upgrade mORMot to version 2 - with a major refactoring.

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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!

2015-04-06

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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2014-12-31

2015: the future of mORMot is BigData

How would be 2015 like for our little rodents?
Due to popular request of several users of mORMot, we identified and designed some feature requests dedicated to BigData process.

In fact, your data is the new value, especially if you propose SaaS (Software As A Service) hosting to your customers, with a farm of mORMot servers.
Recent Linux support for mORMot servers, together with the high performance and installation ease of our executable, open the gate to cheap cloud-based hosting.
As a consequence, a lot of information would certainly be gathered by your mORMot servers, and a single monolithic database is not an option any more.

For mORMot solutions hosted in cloud, a lot of data may be generated. The default SQLite3 storage engine may be less convenient, once it reaches some GB of file content. Backup becomes to be slow and inefficient, and hosting this oldest data in the main DB, probably stored on an expensive SSD, may be a lost of resource. Vertical scaling is limited by hardware and price factors.

This is were data sharding comes into scene.
Note that sharding is not replication/backup, nor clustering, nor just spreading. We are speaking about application-level data splitting, to ease maintenance and horizontal scalability of mORMot servers.

Data sharding could already be implemented with mORMot servers, thanks to TSQLRestStorage:

  • Using TSQLRestStorageExternal: any table may have its own external SQL database engine, may be in its separated DB server;
  • Using TSQLRestStorageMongoDB: any table may be stored on a MongoDB cluster, with its own sharding abilities;
  • Using TSQLRestStorageRemote: each table may have its own remote ORM/REST server.

But when data stored in a single table tends to grow without limit, this feature is not enough.
Let's see how the close future of mORMot looks like.

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2014-11-20

BeDelphi 2014 Slides

We just finished our Be-Delphi 2014 sessions and drank our last beers, so here we are.

I published some slides for this great event.

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2014-10-08

Meet in Belgium!

Just a small message to let you know that I was invited, as a speaker to the BE Delphi 2014 event. This year, the sessions will focus on n-Tier development, so our little mORMot does make sense in the landscape! If you are in Belgium or in Europe, we would be very pleased to meet you there! Thanks  […]

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2014-08-20

List your app on mORMot ShowCase

If you use our little mORMot framework in any of your project, commercial or not, please report it to a new forum thread dedicated for this!
Sounds like if more and more projects are using our little rodent...
The cross-platform clients did increase its popularity, as far as I found out, in the last days.

Furthermore, if you accept that your application is quoted in our framework documentation and web site, and/or your logo displayed, please notify it in the application post or by email to us.

The first listed application - EasyMail7 Client-Server Email Marketing Solution - is indeed impressive, and shows well the Client-Server and storage abilities of the framework.

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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!

Continue reading

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

2014-05-30

Software Design, Brook, mORMot, RAD, SOLID and OOP

We got a very instructive discussion in our forums, with Silvio, the maintainer of the Brook Framework.
Brook is a nice framework for writing web applications using Free Pascal.

It comes to my mind what mORMot can offer.
We did not want to compare the features or say that one framework is better than the other, but it appeared to me that a lot of object pascal programmers are tied to 20th century programming model.

In fact, to embrace the potentials of mORMot, you need to switch your mind, and enhanced your RAD and OOP background, into 21th century SOLID model.

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2014-04-18

Introducing mORMot's architecture and design principles

We have just released a set of slides introducing  ORM, SOA, REST, JSON, MVC, MVVM, SOLID, Mocks/Stubs, Domain-Driven Design concepts with Delphi,  and showing some sample code using our Open Source mORMot framework. You can follow the public link on Google Drive! This is a great opportunity to  […]

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2014-02-28

Think free as in free speech, not free beer

After more than 5 years of opening some huge part of Delphi code base, just my two cents.

Free software means free as a bird.

In practice, most Open Source "consumers" focus on free as a free beer...
This is a reality, especially for "niche" projects like developing libraries for Delphi.

Here are some thoughts from my little experiment with mORMot.
If you ask what Open Source for libraries mean, it may help you!

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2013-03-25

SynProject tool 1.18

We have uploaded an updatetd compiled version of our Open Source SynProject tool in SynProject.zip. Synopse SynProject is an open source application for code source versioning and automated documentation of software projects. Licensed under a GPL license. Main feature is a new (better-looking?)  […]

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2013-01-28

External database speed improvements

Some major speed improvements have been made to our SynDB* units, and how they are used within the mORMot persistence layer.
It results in an amazing speed increase, in some cases.

Here are some of the optimizations how took place in the source code trunk:

Overall, I observed from x2 to x10 performance boost with simple Add() operations, using ODBC, OleDB and direct Oracle access, when compare to previous benchmarks (which were already impressive).
BATCH mode performance is less impacted, since it by-passed some of those limitations, but even in this operation mode, there is some benefits (especially with ODBC and OleDB).

Here are some results, directly generated by the supplied "15 - External DB performance" sample.

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2013-01-20

Adding JavaScript server-side support to mORMot

A long-time mORMot user and contributor just made a proposal on our forums.
He did use mORMot classes to integrate a SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine to our very fast and scaling HTTP server, including our optimized JSON serialization layer.

Today, he sent to me some of his source code, which sounds ready to be included in the main trunk!

This is a great contribution, and Pavel's goal is nothing less than offering
Delphi based, FAST multithreaded server with ORM and node.js modules compatible.

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2012-12-31

Enhance existing projects with mORMot

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.

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