Oregon Delphi User Group

“Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.” Sounds like fun? There are several of us Delphi developers that are interested in this technology and one of our members has offered to share his passion for electronics, give us a hands-on demo, help us get started playing with this technology, and teach us a little of what you can do with it.

As web technologies become more robust and the interfaces more rich and user-friendly and as a plethora of computing devices in every size and price range fill our lives, there is a race in the industry to become a major vendor of development tools to build applications for these various computing platforms. It seems that everyone is touting theirs as the one solution you need to cover all devices, minimize development effort, and provide the best experience for the users of your software.

On February 5, Embarcadero announced the purchase of a popular third party data access component library named AnyDAC. They have rebranded the library FireDAC for consistency with their new FireMonkey brand, although FireDAC doesn’t rely on FireMonkey in any way. FireDAC ships with the Enterprise, Ultimate and Architect SKUs and may be purchased by Pro users as a component pack. In the end, this appears to be a replacement of the dbExpress stack that Embarcadero has previously developed internally.

One of the advantages of using modern development environments such as Delphi is to hide the complexities of displaying controls on a form. Simply place a button or a grid or a label on your form and it looks and behaves like a button or a grid or a label should without any special work. But what if you need to do something that is not covered by the standard set of properties?

For many projects today, it is not enough to work in Delphi. Projects extend to the web. At our January meeting we’ll be exploring how to work with HTML, with an emphasis on the newly-approved HTML 5 standard. Our vehicles of exploration for this presentation will be Delphi and HTML5 Builder. We’ll look at what works - and doesn’t - with these Embarcadero tools. There will also be an open discussion of people’s favorite HTML editor.

Exciting new versions of Delphi and RAD Studio are coming soon. Be among the first to see what’s new in Delphi XE3 and in RAD Studio XE3 – including Delphi, C++Builder, Prism, InterBase and new HTML5 Builder at one of these free, live, launch tour events. Get ready to develop apps for Windows 8. Learn how to give your existing VCL and FireMonkey apps a new Windows 8 look and functionality.

There is no formal presentation this month. We’ll meet and eat at the usual location and talk tech–or any other subject that may come up. A laptop with Delphi 2010 will be hooked up to the big screen TV if we want to explore some topic or pull out a demo from a prior meeting.

Attributes, a language feature brought over from .NET and Java (known as “annotation”), are a language feature of Delphi introduced in version 2010 that allow annotating types and type members with special objects that carry additional information. This information can be queried at run time using RTTI, or Run Time Type Information. Along with existing OOP mechanisms (inheritance and ownership) you can now use annotations for a class and class members to further define what your classes are capable of.

The Open Data Protocol (OData) is a Web protocol for querying and updating data that provides a way to unlock your data and free it from silos that exist in applications today. We’ll see how an old technology in Delphi, WebBroker, has been able to do this for quite some time, but now there’s a cool name and a formalized protocol for it. A sample Delphi application will make obvious how simple it is to open your data to mobile devices!

Crystal Reports is a reporting application that can access data from a wide array of sources. It has come bundled with both Delphi and Visual Studio and is now also available as a web-based application. Many people have used Crystal Reports with Delphi through the years. Tonight’s presentation will be by a company that has been using Crystal Reports since Delphi 3. Crystal 8.5, no longer supported, was the last version that let you install a free runtime for every user.