In the last week we had very busy days. There were two Delphi events happening in Belgium: TMS Business Day, on Wednesday 19th, in Kortrijk, and BE-Delphi, on Thursday 20th, in Antwerp.

On both days we had Wagner Landgraf, the product manager of TMS Business Subscription product line - who flew from Brazil especially for the events - doing presentations about products included in the TMS Business subscription, like our ORM TMS Aurelius, multi-tier TMS XData and TMS RemoteDB, TMS Data Modeler among others. At BE-Delphi, TMS has also done a strong presence with many team members at the TMS booth and a session on multi-tier by Wagner Landgraf.

The most important result of the week was the great feedback we got from the attendees and existing customers. We had time to discuss existing features, future plans for the products, hear suggestions, and most important of all, we have received mostly positive comments about presentations and the products. So thank you all that participated with us! We'll be planning more events on TMS tools in 2015. Let us know where you'd like to meet us and what topics you want to be covered.


TMS Team at BE-Delphi 2014


BE-Delphi 2014 presentation


TMS Business Day 2014

With iOS 7, Apple introduced the new SpriteKit framework for game development on iOS 7. This framework manages things like graphics, animation, physics, particle effects, gravity, ... all things typically needed for game development. The full documentation for SpriteKit can be found in the "SpriteKit Programming Guide"

We did some research here on using the SpriteKit framework from Delphi XE7 and that triggered the idea of creating a small demo with it in XMas spirit as it is the time of the year for it.

In the little demo, we use an XMas tree with gifts under it as background. This is provided as 4 PNG files, a retina and non-retina version for both portrait and landscape mode. The snowflakes in the demo are particles and therefore we need to create a SpriteKit particle file which can be done from XCode. The SpriteKit particle file contains the PNG for a snow flake and the "snow" particle type is chosen. The result is a .SKS file that is linked as resource with the application.
To make the app a little fun, we added a MotionManager. The snow starts falling when you first shake the device. This is accomplished by handling the motionEnded method at UIViewController level. The motion manager is used to make the snow fall faster according to the angle with which you hold the device. The Delphi TMotionSensor makes this possible.
Finally, to stay in the XMas spirit, we added an MP3 files as resource that plays Jingle Bells as background music.


Video demonstration of the application:


Have fun exploring the iOS SpriteKit framework with the full source code for Delphi XE7* of this gift you can download here.

Note: you'll need to add the SpriteKit framework to the Delphi XE7 IDE to compile the app

Early this year, our team started the challenging task to create a new component for WYSIWYG editing of formatted text & images for Delphi. From the start, we want to create a control for FireMonkey that would fit neatly the FMX paradigm of one source code to rule all platforms (Windows, iOS, Android, Mac OSX at this time) but realising this would be a huge effort, we wanted that this effort would also be usable for VCL developers targetting Windows only.

After a lot of research was done on performance (as we knew from our experience with other FMX controls this would be difficult) we decided on what we internally disrespectfully call a sandwich architecture. This sandwich architecture should enable us to isolate a core formatted text handling layer from the framework, i.e. the VCL and FireMonkey framework. The benefit clearly is that work on the core only needs to be done once and further evolutions of the core and its maintenance automatically benefits both VCL and FireMonkey framework versions. Visually, this can be seen as:



The core middle layer not only deals with rendering the formatted text and images but also with all the manipulations that can happen with it. Non-trivial areas in this core middle layer abstraction are: dealing with font handling, coordinates and images that are all treated in a different way in VCL and FireMonkey frameworks. Between this architecture and its final implementation is of course lots and lots of hard work both in development and testing. The final result in VCL and FireMonkey platform running on Windows looks like:

TAdvRichEditor : VCL component from TMS Component Pack



TTMSFMXRichEditor : FireMonkey component from TMS Pack for FireMonkey



To whet your appetite to get started with the new editors regardless of what platform or framework you want to use, here is a short feature list:

• Compact light-weight WYSIWYG editor for formatted text
• Supports formatted text with bullets, hyperlinks, images, indenting
• Paragraphs with left,center,right alignment
• Support for images, plain text and formatted text on clipboard
• Undo/redo support
• Find & replace + text highlighting
• Mailmerge function
• Printing (on Windows)
• Exports to .TXT, .RTF, .HTML files.

To our big surprise, we found out yesterday a customer gave his feedback in the Embarcadero thirdpartytools forum (nntp://embarcadero.public.thirdpartytools.general) when asked for experiences with our ORM and related products;
The saying is, "a picture is worth a thousand words", but in this case, I would rather say "thousand positive words from a customer are priceless". It speaks for itself that our team was delighted to find out about this posting and it's an incredible motivation and boost to continue the development of our components.

The original post is here in its entirety and unedited:

Bernd

I can tell you about my experience with Aurelius and other TMS products.

One year ago I started a new project for a ERP and needed to have it in a 
more modernized way. Pretty much the way you intend to do.

I had some goals:

- using modern Delphi language features. I had no need to be compatible with 
anything from previous versions.

- capable of going crossplatform (so it is FIREMONKEY): in my case i have 
an entire ERP running on android :) very nice this. This is important since 
we are now in a multi OS era. There is no guarantee on wich platform will 
remain in 10 years.

- possibility of isolate modules, or even replace them in case of the vendor/open 
source gets out of the market (or just not get more updates)

- something I could understand withou need to be a phD on the area.

I choose the TMS products because they met this parameters for me.

This is my current result:
AURELIUS

I have Aurelius as my ORM layer. I have an application based on MVP, so my 
Model part understands Aurelius entities. That are plain simple classes. 
I have created my base class with all funcionality needed and Aurelius does 
the rest.

It is fast, and it is bugs free. I have it working on real conditions for 
1 year now and did not get any problem at all. 

The Idea is simple, the code is modern, and it relies on the new delphi language 
features.

It is compatible with mobile and then you can have all the functionality 
on Android or whatever you need. Using most of the important databases, including 
SQLite

I am using frames to create the view part of my MVP. I wire everything with 
LiveBInding and Aurelius provides to you a TAureliusDataSet, a fantastic 
TDataSet descendant that publish by several ways the entities you get from 
the ORM.

Right now it is very handy to me, since I have my data prepared on a parallel 
thread and when done it is set to the TAureliusDataSet. The result is a fluid 
application.

You can Edit one entity, a TLIST<> or a Cursor to your database. You can 
access all the properties of your Entity as fields on the Dataset. It is 
very handy to deal with LiveBindings. 

See, since it is Firemonkey this is the only way if not manual). But I can 
tell you, after getting some experience it is reliable and fast enought for 
work based on XE7 

REMOTEDB

it is the product that permit you connect remotely, you have a server based 
on the http.sys that is the core windows http service and you "write" a server 
based on the documentation. I could add some flavors of my interest of the 
comunication between client and server. (there is another layer called Sparkle 
that is the real http transport here, but just to be simple)

The good thing is that you isolate the native database drivers and you can 
have either mobile using it to connect to your database

XDATA

I am about to move my application to use it. In my case I am waiting for 
a new feature where I would be capable to use Aurelius over XData. XData 
is a OData standard way to share your data. You create your own server following 
the examples and you can use Aurelius in the server side to create your business 
module.

With eh upcoming feature you will be also possible to use Aurelius with the 
Xdata result. Then you can hide business logic on the server side and publish 
only what is relevant.

FLEXCEL

This is the way to go for Reporting. It is not only reporting, but for me 
is a fantastic tool.

It has a core based on excel spreadsheet, you can load, create, change, save 
them, in ANY Platform.

But there is a way to use TEMPLATES. So in my ERP i have created XLS templates 
that are embeded on the exe as resources (25k), then I load it and pass the 
Aurelius results from queries based on Linq. The result is commonly a TList 
or can be anything else. But the Entity objects can be directly accessed 
from the Excel Template!

And the good thing is that it works on any platform! it is very fast. Much 
better than FastReports. Easier to work. You can do a lot more, and you can 
even let your customer create Excel templates (wich customer you have that 
does not know how to use them?)
My ERP is already in use on a big chain pilot project. No trouble at all.

I do not work for TMS, but their support was so help ful for me in many cases 
that I have to give you this information.

I am extremelly satisfied. The price is not high for the product benefits, 
and the result is professional.

Any other specific question please let me know...

Eduardo Elias

In my childhood, I was always fascinated by Lego. I spent countless hours building all kinds of things with Lego, many times a town, all kinds of houses but never forgetting a few sporty cars to accompany each house. What I could build with Lego was mostly limited by my imagination and the number of blocks I had (which was eventually quite a lot as I didn't let any anniversary or special celebration go by to ask for more Lego blocks as a gift). What is so nice about Lego is the easy to use interface between all kinds of blocks. All blocks fit on other blocks and can be effortlessly put together.

From my Lego time, fast-forward about 20 years, in 1995 Delphi brought us the concept of TComponent, an evolution of the TObject originated in Turbo Pascal. TComponent was an invention as magic as the Lego building block. While seamlessly interfacing with its parent, siblings, childs, the major difference with the basic Lego block is that a component can be heavily characterized through its properties. This makes 'playing' with components even more fun, interesting & challenging than playing with Lego was. At TMS software, it is always my objective to build interesting components that are as intuitive as possible to use and that could do interesting things while requiring to write a minimum amount of plumbing code to use them. With a wave of new components we released in the past quarter, I set a challenge for myself to explore and smoothen the ways to interface these building blocks to each other. In this article I wanted to highlight the easiness of bringing together quite sophisticated stand-alone components or building blocks to create powerful solutions.
To demonstrate this, we start with the versatile TMS TAdvStringGrid. With a few properties, this turns into an editable 2D data structure. In our sample, the grid is used to present or capture sales information for a 12 month period. The majority of the effort to write code for this sample goes into initializing the grid. In this case, all we still need to do in code is initialize the data contained in the grid:

var
  i: integer;
begin
  AdvStringGrid1.EditLink := AdvRichEditorEditLink1;
  AdvStringGrid1.Cells[1,1] := '';
  AdvStringGrid1.Cells[2,1] := 'Sales of development tools products per month';
  AdvStringGrid1.MergeCells(2,1,2,1);
  AdvStringGrid1.Cells[0,1] := 'Name';
  AdvStringGrid1.Cells[0,0] := 'Month';
  AdvStringGrid1.Cells[1,0] := 'Units';
  AdvStringGrid1.Cells[2,0] := 'Sales';
  AdvStringGrid1.Cells[3,0] := '% Market';

  for i := 2 to 13 do
  begin
    AdvStringGrid1.Cells[0,i] := FormatSettings.ShortMonthNames[i - 1];
    AdvStringGrid1.Ints[1,i] := Random(100);
    AdvStringGrid1.Ints[2,i] := Random(10000);
    AdvStringGrid1.Ints[3,i] := Random(50);
  end;
end;

  AdvChartLink1.Active := true;
  AdvChartLink2.Active := true;
  AdvChartLink3.Active := true;

  AdvRichEditor1.InsertMultiLineText('Dear Mr. NAME'#13);
  AdvRichEditor1.SelStart := 9;
  AdvRichEditor1.SelLength := 4;
  AdvRichEditor1.SetSelectionMergeField('NAME');

  AdvRichEditor1.InsertMultiLineText('Included is the chart of sales for our development tool product.'#13#13);
  AdvRichEditor1.AddGraphic(500,400,'CHART');

procedure TForm1.AdvRichEditor1DrawGraphic(Sender: TObject; ACanvas: TCanvas;
  ARect: TRect; AID: string);
begin
  if AID = 'CHART' then
    AdvChartView1.PrintAllPanes(ACanvas, ARect);
end;

procedure TForm1.AdvStringGrid1CellValidate(Sender: TObject; ACol,
  ARow: Integer; var Value: string; var Valid: Boolean);
var
  sl: TStringList;
begin
  if (ACol = 1) and (ARow = 1) then
  begin
    AdvRichEditor1.UnMerge;
    sl := TStringList.Create;
    try
      sl.Values['NAME'] := Value;
      AdvRichEditor1.Merge(sl);
    finally
      sl.Free;
    end;
  end;
end;

begin
  AdvRichEditorPDFIO1.Save;
end;

TMS products could be categorized by "application user-oriented" or "application developer-oriented".

Products like TMS Aurelius are heavily developer-oriented: it's the developer that "uses" the product during most of development time and the application user have no idea it even exists. Products like TAdvStringGrid stays in the middle: programming effort might be required to achieve the desired behavior of the grid, but at the same time the application user benefits from grid features, viewing data, interacting with the grid, etc..

TMS Workflow is in the "user-oriented" extreme: it's the application user, that will mostly use it. You will do the effort to do some initial setup, setup some configuration, build some initial integration, and that's it: now it's up to your user to benefit and live with TMS Workflow for the rest of your application life.

This post shows the new features introduced in most recent release of TMS Workflow, version 2.1. And you will see how it's heavily user-oriented and focused to make the life of application user - your customer! - easier.

Variables Tool Window
When building the workflow definition, there are many parameters that can use expressions and thus workflow or system variables. With this new helper tool, users can see all the existing variables that can be used in expressions, and can drag a variable name and drop in a control that accepts expressions to create an expression with the variable name. It's even useful to know which parameters can accept expressions.


Transition Scripts
TMS Workflow provides the Script Block to allow users to execute scripts when the workflow reaches a specified point in the diagram flowchart. But it's often not very productive to create the block, connect lines, etc.. And it also pollutes the workflow diagram with irrelevant information (most managers and workflow developers don't want to a script block in the middle of the process indicating that some low level stuff is being done).
To improve that TMS Workflow 2.1 introduces transition scripts: each transition can have a script associated to it. If the execution flow goes through a specified transition, the script associated with it (if any) is executed. Much easier to setup and makes your workflow diagram display only the relevant parts of the business process.


Send Mail Block
A block to send an e-mail notification. In addition to the automatic e-mail notification about tasks, if the user one to send a custom e-mail to someone, this is a very straightforward way to do it.


Database SQL Block
Executes an SQL statement in the database. Users don't need to create datasets or wait for you to build custom functions. If they just want to update some status in database or set some field value, that's an easy way to do so.


Status Templates
When creating tasks, users need to specify the list of valid status for the task. In many cases, the status are the same: "open/closed", or "pending/approved/rejected". Although TMS Workflow already has the Approval Task Block that automatically creates "approved/rejected" status, your user might have other needs for a different list of status, and still use it to create several different tasks. With status templates, you can predefine a list of status under a specified name, and your user can just choose from those predefined templates to quickly create the list of status in a task.


Comment and Text Blocks
Visual blocks to display information in the workflow diagram. The nice thing about text blocks is that they are dynamic, so your user can build a definition that shows a date, a task status, or other relevant information that changes as the workflow is being executed and tasks are being completed.

From Wikipedia: Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) is a mechanism that enables many resources (e.g. fonts, JavaScript, etc.) on a web page to be requested from another domain outside the domain from which the resource originated. In other words, if you are trying to access entities in a TMS XData server from a web page (for example, using AJAX requests), this mechanism (CORS) will eventually get in action.

Enabling CORS in TMS XData is very simple. Actually a single line of code:

    XDataServerModule.AccessControlAllowOrigin := '*';

And it will handle most of what's needed, including preflighted requests. This post could end here if you are looking about how to deal with CORS in TMS XData. But let me use the opportunity to explain and illustrate how CORS works.

Let's use the SQLiteConsolerServer demo that is included in TMS XData distribution. This very simple demo creates an SQLite database in memory, fill it with some predefined data (artists, albums and tracks), and starts a XData server in the address "http://localhost:2001/tms/music" to provide the objects from the database. This is what you will get after running the demo.

Now if we go to our browser (I'm using Chrome here) and enter the URL "http://localhost:2001/tms/music/Track(1)", this is what we get:

So far so good, our server is providing the JSON representation of our Track object with id equals to 1. But what happens if we try to do the same request using AJAX? Let's create a small HTML page with some JavaScript that performs the same GET request we're doing directly with the browser. Here is the full code of the HTML:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>

<script>
	function processResponse(xmlhttp) {
		switch(xmlhttp.status) {
			case 200:
				var track = JSON.parse(xmlhttp.responseText);
				document.getElementById("getButton").innerText=track.Name;
				break;
			case 404:
				document.getElementById("getButton").innerText="(not found)";
				break;
			default:
				document.getElementById("getButton").innerText="(invalid)";
		}
	}

	function getTrack1Name() { 
		var xmlhttp=new XMLHttpRequest(); 
		
		xmlhttp.onreadystatechange = function() {
			if (xmlhttp.readyState == 4) {
				processResponse(xmlhttp);
			}
		}
		xmlhttp.open("GET","http://localhost:2001/tms/music/Track(1)",true);
		xmlhttp.send(null); 
    }

	function deleteTrack1() { 
		var xmlhttp=new XMLHttpRequest(); 
		xmlhttp.open("DELETE","http://localhost:2001/tms/music/Track(1)",true) 
		xmlhttp.send(null); 
	}
</script>

<button onclick="getTrack1Name();" id="getButton">Get Track 1 Name</button> 
<br><br>
<button onclick="deleteTrack1();">Delete Track 1</button> 

</body>
</html>

Code is very simple, it just provides two buttons that perform GET and DELETE requests to get the name of Track 1 and delete Track 1, respectively.

Let's open that page in browser (I'm using a WAMP server here but you could just double-click the HTML file):

If we click the first button to retrieve the name of Track 1, we get this:

It doesn't work. Why is that? If we press F12 in Chrome to get more info about it, you can get a clue about what's going on:

That's CORS in action. The browser doesn't allow a request from domain "localhost:8080" (where our web page is located) to the domain "localhost:2001" (where our XData server is located) unless our server states that it allows it (using the mentioned response header).

We can then modify our SQLiteConsoleServer demo to add that small line of code mentioned in the beginning of this post:

   {...}
    Module.AccessControlAllowOrigin := '*'; // Add this line
    Server.AddModule(Module);
    Server.Start;
    {...}

Then if we restart our server, refresh our test page, and try pressing the button again, here is what we get:

Now it works! Here is the response returned by the XData server:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Length: 228
Content-Type: application/json
Server: Microsoft-HTTPAPI/2.0
access-control-allow-origin: *
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 2015 14:08:03 GMT

{
    "$id": 1,
    "@xdata.type": "XData.Default.Track",
    "Id": 1,
    "Name": "Black Dog",
    "Composer": "Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones",
    "Milliseconds": 296672,
    "Genre@xdata.ref": "Genre(1)"
}

Note the presence of header "access-control-allow-origin" which states that the server allows requests from any server. You could just restrict this to a specific server origin address by simply defining the name of the server instead of using "*" when setting the property.

Now what about preflighted requests? It will happen when we click our "Delete Track 1" button. From this nice Mozilla web page explaining CORS, it explains that a request must be preflighted if the HTTP method is different than GET, HEAD or POST, or even if request use custom headers or content-type different than some accepted ones. This covers a lot of very common REST requests: DELETE, PUT, or POSTing JSON data.

So what happens exactly when we click "Delete Track 1" button? This is the request Chrome will send to our XData server:

OPTIONS http://localhost:2001/tms/music/Track(1) HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:2001
Connection: keep-alive
Access-Control-Request-Method: DELETE
Origin: http://localhost:8080
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.118 Safari/537.36
Accept: */*
Referer: http://localhost:8080/tests/cors.html
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, sdch
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8,pt;q=0.6

Note that instead of sending a DELETE request, it sent an OPTIONS request, which is the preflighted one. This means the browser is "checking" the server if the request he's going to perform is valid. It indicates it's going to perform a DELETE method using the "Access-Control-Request-Method" header. If the request had different headers, it would also send header "Access-Control-Request-Headers" to check with the server if the headers will be allowed.

The XData server then responds informing the client that the DELETE request will be accepted:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Microsoft-HTTPAPI/2.0
access-control-allow-methods: GET,PUT,PATCH,DELETE,OPTIONS
access-control-allow-origin: *
access-control-max-age: 1728000
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 2015 14:16:15 GMT
Connection: close
Content-Length: 0

And finally, Chrome performs the actual DELETE request:

DELETE http://localhost:2001/tms/music/Track(1) HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:2001
Connection: keep-alive
Origin: http://localhost:8080
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.118 Safari/537.36
Accept: */*
Referer: http://localhost:8080/tests/cors.html
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, sdch
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8,pt;q=0.6

If we press the "Get Track 1 Name" button again, we will be informed it doesn't exist:

So, although enabling CORS in XData is just a single line of code, my intention here was to explain CORS with little more details, including preflighted requests, and show how XData makes it work under the hood.

The latest release of TMS Aurelius introduces an event system that allows you to subscribe listeners to some events that might be fired while you are using Aurelius, especially the TObjectManager.

One key difference between regular Delphi events and Aurelius events is that the latter are multicast events, meaning you can add listeners (handlers) to the events without worrying if you are replacing a listener that was already set to event. This way it's possible to create "plugins" to Aurelius that perform additional logic. For example you can easily add code that will be executed whenever an entity is inserted in the database:

TMappingExplorer.Default.Events.OnInserted.Subscribe(
  procedure(Args: TInsertedArgs)
  begin
    // Use Args.Entity to retrieve the inserted entity
  end
);

  TfmAuditLogViewer = class(TForm)
  private
    FInsertedProc: TInsertedProc;
    FUpdatedProc: TUpdatedProc;
    procedure InsertedHandler(Args: TInsertedArgs);
    procedure UpdatedHandler(Args: TUpdatedArgs);
    procedure SubscribeListeners;
    procedure UnsubscribeListeners;
    {...}
  end;

constructor TfmAuditLogViewer.Create(AOwner: TComponent);
begin
  inherited;
  FInsertedProc := InsertedHandler;
  FUpdatedProc := UpdatedHandler;
end;

procedure TfmAuditLogViewer.SubscribeListeners;
var
  E: TManagerEvents;
begin
  E := TMappingExplorer.Default.Events;
  E.OnInserted.Subscribe(FInsertedProc);
  E.OnUpdated.Subscribe(FUpdatedProc);
end;

procedure TfmAuditLogViewer.UnsubscribeListeners;
var
  E: TManagerEvents;
begin
  E := TMappingExplorer.Default.Events;
  E.OnInserted.Unsubscribe(FInsertedProc);
  E.OnUpdated.Unsubscribe(FUpdatedProc);
end;

procedure TfmAuditLogViewer.InsertedHandler(Args: TInsertedArgs);
begin
  Log(Format('Inserted: %s', [EntityDesc(Args.Entity, Args.Manager)]));
  BreakLine;
end;

procedure TfmAuditLogViewer.UpdatedHandler(Args: TUpdatedArgs);
var
  Pair: TPair<string, Variant>;
  OldValue: Variant;
begin
  Log(Format('Updated: %s', [EntityDesc(Args.Entity, Args.Manager)]));
  for Pair in Args.NewColumnValues do
    if not (Args.OldColumnValues.TryGetValue(Pair.Key, OldValue) and (OldValue = Pair.Value)) then
      Log(Format('   %s Changed from %s to %s',
        [Pair.Key, TUtils.VariantToString(OldValue), TUtils.VariantToString(Pair.Value)]));
  BreakLine;
end;

function TfmAuditLogViewer.EntityDesc(Entity, Manager: TObject): string;
var
  IdValue: Variant;
  IdString: string;
begin
  IdValue :=  TObjectManager(Manager).Explorer.GetIdValue(Entity);
  IdString := TUtils.VariantToString(IdValue);
  Result := Format('%s(%s)', [Entity.ClassName, IdString]);
end;

procedure TfmAuditLogViewer.Log(const S: string);
begin
  Memo.Lines.Add(S);
end;

procedure TfmAuditLogViewer.BreakLine;
begin
  Memo.Lines.Add('================================================');
end;

I'm honored to have been invited to two upcoming first-class Delphi events in Europe (United Kingdom and Germany) in May. I'm looking forward to meet again with so many fellow Delphi developers and discuss topics that excite us all software developers in a changing world. The focus in my session will as-always be on utilizing TMS components to bring to your applications a maximum set of features with a minimum effort, in this case, to FireMonkey cross-platform applications targetting Windows, Android, iOS and Mac OS-X.
What I'm most thrilled about though is the opportunity to let you see a first glimpse of a major new component for FireMonkey under development in our labs for quite some time now. The upcoming events in May will be the very first and only place for now for this sneak preview. Ok, to keep a kind of nostalgic atmosphere of mystery, I say no more here :)

May 6,2015: Spring Delphi Community Conference: National History Museum London, UK

With 20 years of Delphi development, the UK Delphi community comes together on this major event with key speakers Marco Cantu, Jason Vokes, Pawel Glowacki and Stephen Ball covering all the power our beloved language Delphi brings in XE8, MVC / MVVM, multitier development, deployment via Google Play, FireDac ...
Places are limited, so rush to register now for this free event!

May 11-12, 2015: Delphi Developer Days: Holiday Inn Express, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

There is no match in technical depth and amount of information transfer for the Delphi Developer Days. Going strong for years, Delphi Developer Days means 2 days diving deep into all the power Delphi brings for developers. On the menu is modern VCL programming techniques, utilizing the latest database access technologies with FireDac, cross-platform FireMonkey development, REST services, ... in both break-out sessions and sessions in one room. As there is so much information that even 2 days is little to grasp everything, you go home with an over 300 pages conference book to catch-up at home later. This year, Delphi Developer Days is brought by Delphi guru, book writer, consultant, speaker Cary Jensen and Ray Konopka: Embarcadero MVP, winner of the coveted Spirit of Delphi award, and owner and founder of Raize Software, one of the first providers of third-party Delphi components. Places are extremely limited! More information and registration can be found at: Delphi Developer Days

We're thrilled to introduce to you the TMS Planner for FireMonkey, in short TTMSFMXPlanner that has been in development for many months and that is near to being released now.

While TMS Planner for FireMonkey design benefits from the significant experience the TMS team built-up with the award-winning VCL, IntraWeb and ASP.NET Planner components, the new component has been architected from the ground up for cross-platform, multi-device usage. This includes tuning for performance & footprint to run smoothly on Android or iOS smartphones and making the component flexible enough for complex scheduling applications in desktop or tablet applications.

$ sudo apt-get install apache2

$ sudo apt-get install php5
$ sudo apt-get install php5-gd
$ sudo apt-get install sqlite
$ sudo apt-get install php5-sqlite
$ sudo apt-get install php5-curl

$ sudo wget https://download.owncloud.org/community/owncloud-8.0.3.tar.bz2

$ sudo mv owncloud-8.0.3.tar.bz2 /var/www
$ cd /var/www
$ sudo bunzip2 owncloud-8.0.3.tar.bz2
$ sudo tar xf owncloud-8.0.3.tar

$ sudo mkdir /var/www/owncloud/data
$ sudo chown www-data:www-data /var/www/owncloud/data
$ sudo chmod 750 /var/www/owncloud/data

http://192.168.1.100/owncloud/remote.php/caldav/

try
  AdvCalDav1.URL := 'http://192.168.1.100/owncloud/remote.php/caldav/';
  AdvCalDav1.Username := 'tms';
  AdvCalDav1.Password := 'tmsrocks!';
  AdvCalDav1.Active := true;
except
   Exit;
end;

var
  i: integer;
  cdi: TCalDavItem;
  li: TListItem;
begin
  // get events
  for i := 0 to AdvCalDav1.Items.Count - 1 do
  begin
    cdi := AdvCalDav1.Items[i];

    if cdi.vCalendar.vEvents.Count > 0 then
    begin
      li := ListView1.Items.Add;
      li.Caption := cdi.vCalendar.vEvents[0].Summary;
      li.SubItems.Add(FormatDateTime('dd/mm/yyyy hh:nn',cdi.vCalendar.vEvents[0].DTStart));
      li.SubItems.Add(FormatDateTime('dd/mm/yyyy hh:nn',cdi.vCalendar.vEvents[0].DTEnd));
      li.SubItems.Add(cdi.vCalendar.vEvents[0].Location);
      li.SubItems.Add(cdi.vCalendar.vEvents[0].Description.Text);
      li.Data := cdi;     
    end;
  end;
end;

var
  cdi: TCalDavItem;
  li: TListItem;
begin
  // set the calendar for the event
  cdi := AdvCalDav1.Items.Insert('Personal');  // add item to the "Personal" calendar
  cdi.vCalendar.vEvents.Add;
  cdi.vCalendar.vEvents[0].Summary := 'Schloss Dyck Classic Days';
  cdi.vCalendar.vEvents[0].Location := 'Jüchen, Deutschland';
  cdi.vCalendar.vEvents[0].Description.Text := 'Automobile Kulturgeschichte auf der Museums-Insel';
  cdi.vCalendar.vEvents[0].DTStart := EncodeDate(2015,7,31);
  cdi.vCalendar.vEvents[0].DTEnd := EncodeDate(2015,8;2);
  cdi.Post;
end;

var
  cdi: TCalDavItem;
  li: TListItem;
begin
  cdi := ListView1.Selected.Data;
  cdi.vCalendar.vEvents[0].Summary := 'Schloss Dyck Classic Days 2015';
  cdi.Update;
end;

One of my favourite features of TMS XData is its powerful querying capabilities. With no extra line of code in your server, clients can choose how to retrieve the server objects, filter them, set an order, etc..
For example, you can perform a GET request to get Customer objects but filter only those which name is John:

http://server:2001/tms/xdata/Customer?$filter=Name eq 'John'

http://server:2001/tms/xdata/Customer?$filter=Country/Name eq 'USA'

http://server:2001/tms/xdata/Order?$orderby=Date&$top=20&$skip=40

http://server:2001/tms/xdata/Customer?$filter=(Name eq 'John' or Name eq 'Jack') and Country/Name eq 'USA'

http://server:2001/tms/xdata/Invoice?$filter=year(IssueDate) eq 2014

http://server:2001/tms/xdata/Customer?$filter=lower(Name) eq 'paul'

http://server:2001/tms/xdata/Customer?$filter=length(Name) eq 15

http://server:2001/tms/xdata/Customer?$filter=substring(CompanyName, 2, 4) eq 'oogl'

http://server:2001/tms/xdata/Customer?$filter=position('jr', Name) gt 0

TMS software organizes a new training day on Tuesday November 24th in Kortrijk, Belgium. On this training day we will cover following 3 product areas to help you getting the maximum out of your applications with TMS components:

• TMS VCL UI components for Windows application development.
• TMS FireMonkey UI components for cross-platform FireMonkey application development.
• TMS components to access cloud services from Windows and FireMonkey applications.

In tentative program

• 09h00-09h30: Registration & coffee
• 09h30-10h30: In depth with TMS VCL components pt 1
• 10h30-10h45: Q&A
• 10h45-11h15: Coffee break
• 11h15-12h15: In depth with TMS VCL components pt 2
• 12h15-12h30: Q&A
• 12h30-13h30: Lunch
• 13h30-14h30: In depth with TMS FireMonkey components pt 1
• 14h30-14h45: Q&A
• 14h45-15h15: Coffee break
• 15h15-16h15: In depth with TMS FireMonkey components pt 2
• 16h15-16h30: Q&A
• 16h30-17h30: In depth with TMS Cloud components
• 17h30-17h45: Q&A

Registrations until October 31st

• Signup here via the online registration form.
  

Location

• Kennedy Hotel, Pres. Kennedypark 1, B-8500 Kortrijk
• Free parking
• Nearby highway (E17) exit
• Facilities for hotel rooms at the event are available for international attendees

Another busy month went by at tmssoftware.com and so much happened that it is good to quickly summarize everything new that was introduced.

TMS All-Access

TMS Component Pack v8.0

TMS VCL Cloud Pack, TMS FMX Cloud Pack

TMS Hands-on training day

TMS Flexcel DLL

TMS Pack for FireMonkey v3.2

RAD Studio 10 Seattle support

New developments

Where in earlier versions, the method for adding values to a chart was via multiple calls to TMSFMXChart.Series[x].AddSinglePoint(), the new virtual mode offers a faster solution that is more flexible and typically consumes less memory. This can of course make a welcome difference when creating applications for mobile devices.
To start using the new TMS FMX Chart virtual mode, two events need to be implemented:

TMSFMXChart.OnGetNumberOfPoints()
and
TMSFMXChart.OnGetPoint()

In the first event, OnGetNumberOfPoints(), that is triggered for each series in the chart, the number of desired data points can be returned via the ANumberOfPoints parameter.
In this sample event handler, the number of points is set to 10000 for each series in the chart:

procedure TForm1.TMSFMXChart1GetNumberOfPoints(Sender: TObject;
  ASerie: TTMSFMXChartSerie; var ANumberOfPoints: Integer);
begin
  ANumberOfPoints := 10000;
end;

var
  data_arr_1, data_arr_2: array of double;
begin
  SetLength(data_arr_1,10000);
  SetLength(data_arr_2,10000);
  for i := 0 to Length(data_arr) - 1 do
    begin
      data_arr_1[i] := random(100) / 33;
      data_arr_2[i] := random(200) / 25;
    end;
end;

procedure TForm1.TMSFMXChart1GetPoint(Sender: TObject;
  ASerie: TTMSFMXChartSerie; AIndex: Integer;
  var APoint: TTMSFMXChartPointVirtual);
begin
   case ASerie.Index of
   0: if AIndex < Length(data_arr_1) then  
          APoint.YValue  := data_arr_1[AIndex]
   1: if AIndex < Length(data_arr_2) then  
          APoint.YValue  := data_arr_2[AIndex]
   end;
end;

  TMSFMXChart1.Series[0].AutoYRange := arEnabled;
  TMSFMXChart1.Series[0].MaxX := 100;
  TMSFMXChart1.Series[1].AutoYRange := arEnabled;
  TMSFMXChart1.Series[1].MaxX := 100;

The world of IoT opens fascinating & innovative capabilities to steer & sense the physical world from small programmable devices like the Raspberry Pi. It becomes even more interesting when this can be connected to cloud services. Imagine a device that unlocks a door at times controlled by a Google Calendar, a device monitoring noise levels in a room and sending a push notification to a mobile phone when a level is exceeded, a device automatically controlling a step motor with data retrieved from a Google Sheet, a device that counts people passing a door and logging this data in a DropBox data file, ... and so much more...

All this is nowadays not only possible, but it is also cheap to make and easy to write software for with the Pascal programming language.
With respect to writing the software that connects embedded apps to all kinds of popular cloud services, the all new TMS LCL Cloud Pack offers numerous easy to use components that seamlessly interact with these cloud services. It offers access to all popular cloud storage services, social media, calendering services, push notification services and more... See full list here.

In our lab, we had fun making a sample app that shows the number of visitors on our website that is retrieved with the Google Analytics realtime data API on a quad 7 segment LED with only a few lines of code.

In order to get started writing cloud-connected apps for the Raspberry Pi, all you need to do is download & install Lazarus v1.5 on your Raspberry Pi and then download & install the TMS LCL Cloud Pack. After install, over 30 new components are available for you. Then register for an application key & secret at your favorite cloud service and use our new Access Token generator app for Windows & Mac OS-X we created especially for TMS LCL Cloud Pack and have it generate the access token and export the token to your Raspberry Pi. With this mechanism, your embedded app can connect to cloud services without requiring any user interaction on the device for authentication & authorization for using a service. Once this is done, you're ready to let the cloud service component of your choice start consuming or producing data for the cloud service.

Finally, note that with Lazarus and our TMS LCL Cloud Pack, you're not limited to Raspberry Pi only. You can develop the prototype of the Raspberry Pi app on a Windows, Mac OS-X, Linux machine or can make full apps for these operating systems as well.

Just like September, November & December were again very busy months here at tmssoftware.com. A small overview:

TMS Logging

• A single developer license can be purchased for 75 EU.
• Users with an active license to TMS ALL-ACCESS or TMS VCL Subscription have received TMS Logging free.

TMS LCL Cloud Pack

• A single developer license can be purchased for 95 EU.
• Users with an active license to TMS ALL-ACCESS or TMS Cloud Studio have received TMS LCL Cloud Pack free.

TMS Hands-on training day

myWebMachine

TMS iCL v2.8.0.0

TMS Component Pack updates

TMS FMX Chart v1.5.0.0

Knowledge base alert

Best wishes for a happy & prosperous New Year from the TMS team!

On this last day of the year, we'd like to introduce a first version of a little New Year's gift for you, Pascal developers. If you are, like us, excited about Internet of Things, embedded software development, DIY projects, controlling electronics from your code, ... we have for you a first version of our new free & open-source bundle of hardware access components for Raspberry Pi. You can download full source code from here

var
  v: integer;
  s: string;
begin
TMSLCLAdaDispl16x2.Init;
v := TMSLCLAdaADC12B.ReadChannel(0);
s := 'Value: ' + IntToStr(v) + 'V';
TMSLCLAdaDispl16x2.DrawText(s);
end;