Oregon Delphi User Group

Embarcadero’s Delphi XE5 Tour! The evening event has been CANCELLED! Instead, you are invited to Ruth’s Chris Steak House in Portland at noon. Because there were two events on this date and far many more people registered with Embarcadero for the noon event than the evening event, Embarcadero has eliminated the evening one. There will not be any meeting at the Fanno Creek Brew Pub in December. At this technical and interactive session, attendees will:

Delphi, C#, Oxygene, and JavaScript Since programming languages were invented, people have tried to use one code base to get an application to run on multiple platforms. Whether it meant building custom compilers or interpreters for each platform (BASIC, C, JavaScript, Python), or writing an API layer for each device that talks to a generic module (Java, .NET), the goal has been to reduce the time it takes to develop a product while having it work for as wide a market as possible.

General discussions about technology, the state of Object Pascal, and future meetings.

“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.