Oregon Delphi User Group

Have you ever heard the phrase, March is for Makers? With the rise of inexpensive and easy-to-use micro computers, people are enjoying the hobby of making all kinds of gadgets themselves. Arduino and Raspberry Pi are two of the most popular names in the maker space. So what does this have to do with Delphi? Nothing necessarily. However, some of our members have shown how to connect and control small devices with a Delphi program.

DevArt Software is once again sponsoring our meeting and will offer the standard 20% discount and one product license give-a-way to a randomly chosen attendee. We will have a discussion about their Data Access Tools, or DAC for short. I will show some demos, some prepared by DevArt, some written by myself. They will cover SQLServer, SQLite, VirtualTable, and MySQL database connections. We will also have some audience participation to cover Firebird support through IBDAC and will touch on Oracle considerations.

Let’s just talk about the state of development, tools in use today, what transpired over the last year, and where you think industry trends are headed this year.

This month, we have a couple of topics to cover. The first presentation will cover manipulating meta files, including reading them from a database, displaying them properly on various sized screens, and preparing them for printing. The really cool thing is a metafile permits consistent quality report printing regardless of monitor resolution, aspect ratio, or user selected enlargement (125%, 150%, etc.). They can be used with any report writer that supports a TImage equivalent.

The official title of this month’s meeting is, “An Overview of Quality Management Principles as Applied to Software Development.” That’s may look like a lot to swallow, but it’s important to differentiate Quality Management from Quality Assurance, and this talk will be specifically geared to you, the software developer. Finally, since we only have an hour or two, it’ll be just an overview–this topic could consume a large amount of time.

This month, we’ll have a general tech session, discussing whatever subjects happen to come up while we eat and catch up on what’s been going on over the summer.

This month, we have a short demonstration of SecureBridge, another great product by DevArt. This small set of components makes setting up SSH and SFTP client and server connections a breeze and the latest version supports all the new security-enhanced protocols required by today’s increased standards. DOOR PRIZE! Once again, DevArt, a database component and tools vendor for Delphi and .NET, is sponsoring our meeting! One lucky attendee, picked at random from those who submit their name and email, will be eligible for one free license of either SecureBridge or a Delphi Data Access Product from the DevArt Store!

This month is going to be a “show and tell” with three different applications: an Android application using Delphi and FireMonkey, a insurance management program incorporating compiled resources, a back-end integration using plug-in modules, REST APIs, and UniDAC accessing SQLite and MySQL. The goal is to show, again, the variety of software that can be produced with Delphi. Hopefully, it will inspire questions and provide insight into topics that might be of interest for future meetings.

This month, we’ll take a look at a project that involved multiple technologies. A church requested a touch-screen enabled member photo display in their lobby. After some research and looking at options, it was decided the display would be built in HTML5 using jQuery libraries to provide picture zooming and layout control and so that it could work on multiple devices with varying screen sizes. The list of member names and picture filenames was maintained in two spreadsheets, one sorted by last name and one sorted by first name.

This month we’ll just have a tech gab session, if that’s alright with everyone. We could discuss further last month’s topic, contemplate the meaning of Idera’s purchase of Embarcadero and what to make of their recent announcement to focus exclusively on developer tools, show off a latest gadget you might have, or just brainstorm on what the next killer app might be.