Oregon Delphi User Group

This month, David Cornelius will explore several of the recently open sourced libraries previously sold commercially by TurboPower Software, one of the largest Delphi and C++Builder 3rd-party tools vendors over the last decade. Not all the libraries available can be adequately covered in one night. Therefore, we will look at the following code packages (descriptions taken from SourceForge.NET where these code libraries can be obtained): Abbrevia is a compression toolkit for Borland Delphi, C++Builder, & Kylix.

There is no formal presentation this month. David Cornelius will provide a laptop with Delphi 6 Professional and several 3rd-party components (including all the TurboPower open source libraries). If anyone has a small project or some questions about code or techniques, please bring your questions or a disk with code that we can load to share and discuss with any others that may attend.

Learn what’s new in the upcoming release of the Advantage Database v7.0 scheduled for Fall 2003. Highlighted features for ADS v7.0 included, Full-text Search and Triggers among many others. The Advantage Database Server is a scalable, high performance client/server RDBMS for networked, stand-alone, Internet and mobile database applications. The Advantage Database Server supports many development environments including Borland Delphi and C++ Builder. Advantage Database provides native connections for most developments environments, facilitating easy integration with new and existing applications.

Borland has announced C#Builder, an IDE for Microsoft’s .NET platform and the C# language. Even if you have no intention of using C# or .NET, you should pay attention to this product because it is a major milestone for Borland. Borland has created a new IDE core, which will be used in the next Delphi for Windows and Delphi for .NET products. Also of interest to Delphi programmers is a glimpse at Borland’s new strategic focus on Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM).

It’s too easy to intertwine the Graphical User Interface (GUI) with the data. But what if you want to later use the data in a different context? You either have to extract the code, or re-write it. Event-driven programming can help significantly to keep your application looking sharp and responsive while keeping the data as a separate entity. PRESENTER David Cornelius has been a developer for 15 years working mostly on the DOS and Windows platforms using Borland’s Pascal compilers.

Firebird is a relational database offering many ANSI SQL-92 features that runs on Linux, Windows, and a variety of Unix platforms. It has been used in production systems, under a variety of names since 1981. Much development has occured since Firebird rose from the ashes of the Open sourcing of Interbase. In this presentation some of the topics we’ll explore and demonstrate include: A brief history of Firebird/InterBase A review of Firebird’s Features What’s new since the open sourcing of InterBase What’s new in the forthcoming release of Firebird 1.

CodeWright and Delphi are a perfect combination for Delphi programmers. Delphi provides necessary tools for developing applications. CodeWright supplies invaluable tools for analyzing and editing Pascal and other Delphi code. This presentation shows some of the ways that Delphi development tools and CodeWright editing features complement each other. It first shows how CodeWright works with Delphi through environment synchronization, project creation, command line configuration and file support. It then describes some of the features that make CodeWright a useful tool for Delphi programmers.

As mentioned during past meetings, a copy of Kylix 2 Enterprise was given to the Oregon Delphi Users Group to rebuild their web site and learn about and help promote both Kylix and web site development with Borland’s Object Pascal tools. That was over a year ago. Well, instead of waiting for someone to have time, we might as well just do it during one of our meetings! We will start off in Delphi 6 Pro tonight and move to Kylix 2 Enterprise at a future meeting (possibly January).

Homer Jones will present a commercial document management application built around ImageEn version 1.97 ImageEn is a set of 100% vcl Image processing components. It is a little-known, but viable alternative to ImageLib and LeadTools. While documentation is marginal, the Delphi code examples make up for the deficiency. Using ImageEn enabled Homer to build his own Twain user interface. While one might ask “why”, having a uniform user interface makes customer support much easier (you don’t need to know every user interface of every scanner manufacturer).

ModelMaker is a modeling / UML tool written in Delphi for Delphi which provides fast class design, diagramming, and code generation. It can also import existing units, provides a structured differencing engine, and can apply templates and patterns to class designs. The presenter has no vested interest in ModelMaker, but has found it to be an invaluable tool. Also demonstrated is the ModelMaker Code Explorer, which is a Delphi plug-in that provides a subset/superset of ModelMaker functionality directly to Delphi.