Search the Community

Since years, our Open Source mORMot framework offers several ways to work with any kind of runtime arrays/objects documents defined, e.g. via JSON, with a lot of features, and very high performance. Our TDocVariant custom variant type is a powerful way of working with such schema-less data, but it was found confusing by some users. So we developed a new set of interface definitions around it, to ease its usage, without sacrificing its power. We modelized them around Python Lists and Dictionaries, which is proven ground - with some extensions of course. Two one-liners may show how our mORMot library is quite unique in the forest/jungle of JSON libraries for Delphi (and FPC): +] assert(DocList('[{ab:1,cd:{ef:"two"}}]')[0].cd.ef = 'two'); assert(DocList('[{ab:1,cd:{ef:"two"}}]').First('ab<>0').cd.ef = 'two'); Yes, this code compiles and run on Delphi - even the antique Delphi 7. 😆 If you compare e.g. to how the standard JSON library works in the RTL, with all its per-node classes, you may find quite a difference! And there is no secret in regard to performance, that our JSON processing is fast. More info: https://blog.synopse.info/?post/2024/02/01/Easy-JSON-with-Delphi-and-FPC

With this new year, it was time to make a mORMot 2 release. We went a bit behind the SQlite3 engine, and we added some nice features. 😎 Main added features: - OpenSSL 3.0/3.1 direct support in addition to 1.1 (with auto-switch at runtime) - Native X.509, RSA and HSM support - mget utility (wget + peer cache) Main changes: - Upgraded SQLite3 to 3.44.2 - Lots of bug fixes and enhancements (especially about cryptography and networking) - A lot of optimizations, so that we eventually reached in top 12 ranking of all frameworks tested by TFB https://github.com/synopse/mORMot2/releases/tag/2.2.stable 🙂

Today, almost all computer security relies on asymmetric cryptography and X.509 certificates as file or hardware modules. And the RSA algorithm is still used to sign the vast majority of those certificates. Even if there are better options (like ECC-256), RSA-2048 seems the actual standard, at least still allowed for a few years. So we added pure pascal RSA cryptography and X.509 certificates support in mORMot 2. Last but not least, we also added Hardware Security Modules support via the PKCS#11 standard. Until now, we were mostly relying on OpenSSL, but a native embedded solution would be smaller in code size, better for reducing dependencies, and easier to work with (especially for HSM). The main idea is to offer only safe algorithms and methods, so that you can write reliable software, even if you are no cryptographic expert. 😉 More information in our blog article about this almost unique features set in Delphi (and FPC): https://blog.synopse.info/?post/2023/12/09/Native-X.509-and-RSA-Support

Tired of creating the descendants of TActiveRecord by hand? GitHub MVC_AR_EntityGenerator is an OpenSource project developed in Delphi XE 12 that takes the metadata of your Database and creates one class ActiveRecord of each Table in the Database. You can generate the AR of one table or one AR class for each table in the Database. You can indicate in which folder the AR file should be deployed, and the program will remember it. Each AR is generated in an independent .pas file. And this is only the Beta version. You save all the information used to generate the AR; when you need to develop it again, you only need to use it. In the next version, we plan to implement more types of AR, like, for example, AR with a Master-Detail Relationship. In the current version, you can change the name of the Class generated. This is useful when you want, for example, the AR class representing one member of the entity Customers, instead of being named TCustomers, to be named TCustomer; that is more accurate. I want to implement, too, a connection with the AI (probably Chat-GPT) to ask directly for the translation of the plural table names to singular class names. In this target, I want the AI to modify the table name to respect the Camel Style of Pascal Class names. For example, a table named Items_Owned_by_user is currently created as TItemsownedbyuser. The AI can easily convert this to TItemsOwnedByUser, which is more accurate to the style of Pascal code. And many more things can be made with an open-source project. Do you don't think it!! Try it, and let us know what you think! Thanks PD: The project is also an excellent example of using SQLite as a memory store for the data and treating this data as a standalone project, in contrast to the concept of a Database on Disk, which is more current in Delphi.

We just introduced in our Open Source mORMot 2 framework two client units to access DNS and LDAP/CLDAP servers. You can resolve IP addresses and services using DNS, and ask for information about your IT infrastructure using LDAP. There are not so many working and cross-platform OpenSource DNS and LDAP libraries around in Delphi or FPC, especially compatible with the latest MS AD versions. And none was able to use Kerberos authentication, or signing/sealing, AFAIK. Last but not least, its DNS and CLDAP server-auto-discovery feature is pretty unique. Please see https://blog.synopse.info/?post/2023/04/19/New-DNS-and-(C)LDAP-Clients-for-Delphi-and-FPC-in-mORMot-2 🙂

Now that Delphi 10.3 Rio is out, we had to ensure that our little mORMot would run with this revision. Since we don't make any commercial software with Delphi any more (we switched to FPC), I downloaded the Community Edition. We disabled the Error Insight feature, which seems not very stable especially with our mORMot complex units - as with previous Delphi versions. In respect to the previous "Starter" editions, this CE version includes everything you expect for good work: Win32 + Win64 + OSX + mobile compilers, and even the source code of the RTL and enabled command-line compilers! The IDE seems really refreshed with its new layout. You feel at home and with some modern and fresh air! Great work Embarcadero! Of course, the "Pro" and "Architect" features are missing (like FireDAC, DataSnap or RADServer). But mORMot is self-contained even for the database access, so with the CE you can write full-features REST/SOA client-servers and MVC web applications, with a simple ORM and high-performance OleDB/ODBC database access to SQlite3, MSSQL, Oracle, Firebird, MySQL and others (by-passing the TDataSet class for better performance) and even NoSQL like MongoDB. Ensure you follow the Embarcadero license terms when you use mORMot with the Community Edition. With Rio, the main breaking change was that the PCRE API switched from an UTF-8 to UTF-16, and did hide the UTF-8 function calls. But after a small patch, now everything works as expected - at least for our regression tests. See http://blog.synopse.info/post/2018/11/24/mORMot-running-on-Delphi-10.3-Rio