Summer is a great time to catch up with books that you have on your shelf, but do not have time to read. Obviously I would suggest starting from my recently released "Expert Delphi", but there are plenty of other interesting books to look at. I have recently bought printed (!) version of "Serverless Architectures on AWS" book by Peter Sbarski. "Serverless" is to me the biggest thing in years on the "server-side". No more thinking in terms of provisioning virtual machines in the cloud. The very ...

The new hype in Enterprise architectures are "micro-services". The concept to build distributed systems from many small, independent building blocks that are accessible through REST APIs is not new. The rise of container architecture where you can realistically start the whole operating system very quickly to just serve a method call. When you start thinking about building such a solution, or at least demo, one of the first questions are about handling security. Clearly just using HTTPS is...

In the webinar, Demystifying Macros with ER/Studio, Embarcadero Software Consultant Stanley Chan demonstrated how macros work in ER/Studio. He showed how to use the built-in macros and also shared some custom macros during the session. If you missed the live presentation, you can watch it on demand. There were a lot of great questions during the session, some of which Stan didn’t have time to answer live. So he has provided responses to several of those for this blog. Q: In the color-coding de...

Sometimes you need to face the inevitable: the tool selected years ago is not the one you need for the future. Have you been struggling with complicated modeling tasks or outdated tools? Are your data models getting too big to handle? We’ve heard from a lot of customers recently who have been frustrated with their old data modeling tools, for multiple reasons such as: Lack of functionality Lack of support Lack of a future roadmap Embarcadero is committed to enabling our users to adapt to...

My "RAD in Action: Build Modern Apps with Enterprise Mobility Services" webinar is happening right now. During my 50 minutes session I'm demonstrating using DataSnap framework for building multi-tier database application with FireDAC JSON Reflection framework. That's very powerful and very easy to code. During the demo I have illustrated the following best practices: InterBase „EMPLOYEE” sample database FireDAC database access components DataSnap server deployed to a web server ...

The fourth season of Embarcadero EMEA "Developer Direct ONLINE!" webinars is half way! There are still three more episodes to go, 30 minutes every second Friday at 11am Amsterdam (10am UK) time. With every webinar we have more attendees and you can still register at embt.co/embtdd4 Today I had a pleasure of talking about some of the cool Object Pascal programming language features that were introduced in recent Delphi versions, including: Type helpers for primitive and custom types Gene...

There is plenty of interesting Delphi, Appmethod and FireMonkey information published very frequently on www.fmxexpress.com website. A very interesting article was published on fmxexpress about Box2d Physics Engine For Delphi XE6 FireMonkey on Android, iOS, Windows and OSX a few days ago. You have probably heard about "Angry Birds". It is probably the most easy to remember example of an application that is using Box2D. Box2D is one the most popular, open-source engine for simulating r...

"Developer Direct" live webinars start again. It is already the fourth season. We had a few months break and now we are coming again with slightly changed formula. 30 minutes live, demo oriented, hands-on session about coding every second Friday, starting this coming Friday, on April 11th, at 11am CET (Amsterdam time). The agenda and registration links are available online at http://embt.co/embtdd4 We have six sessions planned for season 4: 11 April 2014 - FireDAC 25 April 2014 - Vis...

During my recent CodeRage 8 "Secure DataSnap Development" session, I have promised to make the source code of both demos available for download. I have just uploaded them to Embarcadero CodeCentral! Demo 1: Secure C++Builder DataSnap "Hello World" server and mobile client This is a very simple demo that shows basic security in DataSnap, including secure communication with HTTPS protocol, encryption transport filters plus authentication and authorisation in code. Demo 2: Secure C++ Dat...

One of the most important things about any application, and especially mobile apps, is short start-up time. End user does not like to wait for too long for an app to start. In some cases, if the start-up time is excessively long a mobile app may not be accepted into an app store. I have been building a lot of mobile apps recently for both Android and iOS in Delphi and found myself reusing the same "lazy form creation" design pattern, that I would like to share with you. The idea is not new...