Angus Robertson

Look at the new TIcsMailQueue component added to ICS earlier this year, it does exactly what you need. You can queue hundreds of emails at the same time, and they will be sent and retried over several minutes or days. The component is described half way down the page at http://wiki.overbyte.eu/wiki/index.php/ICS_V8.60 Angus

Not sure why you want to run the server in a thread, that just listens on one or more ports and creates clients. Running the client in a thread can be done, ICS has TWSocketThrdServer that does exactly that, but it is rarely used, has not been updated for 10 years, lacks newer multi-listen and SSL stuff and there is no web server derived from it, lack of demand from end users. My own TSslHttpAppSrv SQL driven web server runs happily in a single thread, the SQL stored procedures rarely take very long so are not blocking others users significantly, obviously this depends on volume, I'm only handling couple of thousand SQL requests a day, from the logging, SQL proc took 16ms, 31ms, 141ms, 63ms, 390ms, 16ms. So I never bothered with threads. As Francois says, using a thread just for the database lookup and returning the page in the main thread is the safest solution, look at class TClientProcessingThread in the ICS FTP server which uses a thread to calculate MD5sums and directory listing, Angus

ICS support Delphi 7 onwards so we avoid any language features or libraries added after that, or have our own versions of them, such as ANSI or Wide5tring functions. Users tell me quickly if I accidentally do something that Delphi 7 does not support so it is still used. Angus

Good, seems to read whole pages correctly now. BTW, your ICS fix is in SVN now. Angus

Or the automated Google scan tools were finding something in one of the components or OpenSSL binaries that has been used in a malicious application somewhere, unfortunately they don't tell you anything specific, just that your site is banned in all browsers until you remove your malicious file, so it's trial and error. Angus

Not sure when Default() was added, but it gave an error in Delphi 2007. The keep-alive issue was not in the ICS server, but in my application. But you still need to fix data being received correctly, if you remove the close line for your google example, it takes four minutes for the window to become responsive and display the received data, which is the Google timeout. The Microsoft page actually shows how poor the ciphers are in older Windows versions, it says there are none for TLS/1,2 in Windows 7, although a couple have now been added. but not nearly as good as OpenSSL supports on Windows 7. Angus

I started fixing errors with Delphi 2007 to get it to build, but there were too many. Simple things like type LONG missing. Does not matter for personal projects, but is important if the code is ever to incorporated into libraries. The issue with async requests seems to relate to most of the content not being returned until the connection is closed. This URL works fine: www.magsys.co.uk GET /delphi/ddservice.asp HTTP/1.1 Connection: close Host: www.magsys.co.uk While this does not, the end of the page only appears after the server closes the connection on a 60 second timeout: www.telecom-tariffs.co.uk GET /serverinfo.htm HTTP/1.1 Connection: close The first server is IIS. the second the ICS web server, so it seems we have aggressive Keep-Alive that is ignoring the Close command, another ICS bug for me to fix. But it shows up a bug in your code as well. I chose that page because it shows the SSL/TLS connection parameters selected by the server, useful to check browser capabilities, and the poor range of ciphers supported by SChannel on older versions of Windows. Angus

And a link to the download page top left, with the words Download Latest DDService. There are no zips on the open Delphi pages because Google blacklists my site when it finds Delphi components. Angus

I've completed a new release of DDService Application Framework from the late Arno Garrels, it now supports Delphi 5, 7 and 2006 to XE8, 10 Seattle, 10.1 Berlin, 10.2 Tokyo and 10.3 Rio, as well as C++ Builder 2006 to XE5. Note that bugs fixed in these new releases had already been done in DDService. Also added new unit to control, install and remove Windows Service applications. The new and old versions may be downloaded from https://www.magsys.co.uk/delphi/ddservice.asp or from an SVN repository at: http://svn.magsys.co.uk:8443/svn/ddservice/ , use username = ics and password = ics for read access. Angus

Interesting, it does work with modern compilers, not with Delphi 2007, too many new language features. At least the sync request returns a full page, the async request only returns one buffer load of data. While SChannel avoids the need for OpenSSL DLLs, it does mean encryption protocols and ciphers are determined by Microsoft, and they don't really care about keeping up to date, particularly with older operation systems, it took years for Windows Vista and 7 to get TLS/1,2 and probably only because anything older is becoming obsolete soon. TLS/1,3 is still not supported by Windows 10/2019 a year after everyone else started using it, including ICS. If you take this further, ICS already has soon functions to interact with the Windows certificate store for checking certificate chains, it's one of our options, using them will save you a lot of effort. Angus

Yes, should not have taken that out, we do need to break the loop, I'll put it back. However even that may not stop TriggerDataAvailable being called again since there may still be received data buffered, Much nicer if there was no exception in the first place. Angus

There is no need for the function DetectRemoteSession to be in the DPR, it can just as easily be in MainFrm.pas, just not in a method in a form. Angus

Look at the new sample OverbyteIcsSslMultiWebServ.dpr in \Samples\delphi\sslinternet\, this is effectively a commercial web server using THTTPAppServer and lots of AddGetHandler, with a minimal interface designed to be used as a Windows service. I will be adding another ICS sample shortly using the DDService environment once I've brought it up to date for new compilers, but the ICS code will be identical. Your exception must relate to code you've written in the handler, add some error handling. Angus

I'm attempting a new release of DDService adding support for XE7 and later. Collected original SvcMgr.pas files from all versions if Delphi, think I have to update each new one to DDSvMrg,pas and then create DIFF files using WinMerge. Not too hard, since there is only a single service bug fix (quoting image path) in 15 years and Arno fixed that in 2008. But are there any other service handler bugs in DDService that should be fixed for a new release? I also want to add an example of how to use DDService for dual GUI/service , there is a demo CombiService on my system but not tried it and not sure where it came from Has anyone done this with DDService? Angus

That was where I was getting confused, a server running on the client is simple but unlikely to work in 99% of cases unless the client has a unique public IP address, most of us block incoming connections, use NAT., dynamic IP addresses, firewalls, etc. But leaving a connection open to a remote server is even worse once you have more than a few hundred clients, servers can only handle a few thousand simultaneous connections at best. Still no idea what a data consumer means. If it is a local web server and only needs to handle simple notifications to update pages, then the new TSimpleWebSrv added recently is lightweight and easier to implement than the full web server, ICS uses it for Let's Encrypt authentication requests and OAuth2. Angus