I'm currently starting to integrate "Delphi Web Script" in my application basically only as a scripting engine (interfacing with functions, classes, etc.); awesome software for the standard delphi open source quality in my opinion, but just for curiosity,
What's exactly the "web part" of the project?
How is intended to be used?
It was used somewhere with some success commercially?
Thanks!
As ain said, the original use was for PHP-like, ASP-like server-side web-page generation, but it was also capable of general purpose use, which is what I used it for. And as I did not use the "web" side of DWScript, most of the "web-oriented" features haven't been ported over (only the HTML Filter was ported actually).
The Web functionality is still available in the SourceForge repository, if someone wants to tackle the port. Though, they may be outdated beyond simple renamed methods and classes, as since DWSII, the script engine has gained various features. For instance, it is now capable of multiple thread-safe executions of a single compiled script, while the old codebase is built around the limitation that a compiled script can be executed by only one thread at a time.
On the other hand, there are some new features that could simplify the porting, the simple WebServer demo recently added uses RTTI to expose TWebResponse & TWebRequest f.i. (was manually exposed in DWSII). On the down side, that's only possible with recent Delphi versions.
AFAIK the main focus of the original author of this scripting engine was to make it possible to embed Pascal scripts into HTML pages, just like ie PHP does it. Hence the name "Delphi Web Script". While the focus of the current maintainer, Eric Grange, is on using it as a general purpose scripting engine, it should still be possible to use it for web purposes as well - for that you use the "filters" feature of the library. Check out the dwsHtmlFilter unit for HTML filter.
Related
I'm starting to study Dart. It seems a nice language and in some aspects a real improvement over JavaScript. Since it claims to come with "batteries included" and to be meant for "structured web apps", though, I fail to understand how to actually structure a web app with it. Almost all the tutorials concentrate on language features, but Dart is quite simple and with many familiar bits, so that's the easy part.
Recently I fell in love with AngularJs. Now routing, two way binding, nested scope, clean separation of concerns... This actually means "structured" to me. But all the Dart examples I find are about selecting HTML elements and attaching listeners to them. This is old-style jQuery-like web programming and quite frankly the opposite of what I think of when I read "structured".
I don't want to compare a language and a framework and I know that Angular Dart is out, but I fear I'm missing something of vanilla Dart, because if it's all about a shorter syntax for lambdas, class based OOP vs prototypical OOP and the like, I don't see how it's supposed to be a game changer: there are many other languages that provide an alternative JS syntax (à la CoffeeScript) and compile to it, and they don't come at the price of losing a perfect integration with existing JavaScript libraries and tools.
Sure, it has optional static typing, which may be great, but this comes more to a matter of preferences. I'm a full time Python and Ruby developer and I'm perfectly fine with dynamic languages. Is this what they mean by "structured"?
Thanks for any clarification that will eventually come.
I work on AngularDart and have some experience structuring web apps.
When building a web app in Dart you would pick a web app framework, for example AngularDart or polymer.dart. Web app frameworks have a lot of opinion which is something that doesn't fit in the core libraries. In that respect, "vanilla Dart" is fairly vanilla.
Since I'm most familiar with Angular, I'll discuss the Angular + Dart combination. However, the rest of this post is also true for polymer.dart.
Angular provides a lot of structure to your app. We've been able to provide a similar structure for both Dart and Javascript. The concept of directives, data binding and dependency injection exist in both.
Dart provides more structure and we've been able to use that structure while building AngularDart. e.g. the directive API is defined in terms of annotations which means that IDEs understand them and can help you code.
There are a number of "structure" features in Dart. One of my favourites is tooling. With types and annotations comes better tooling support.
Types in Dart are most useful when combined with tools. Auto-complete is great but for large web projects, static analyze is even better. For example, in AngularDart, since directives are annotated classes, we can assert that the annotation is correct. Even more interesting is the potential to build tools. In AngularDart, we have a tool that extracts and analyzes all directives. This type of tooling is possible in Javascript but easy and supported by the language in Dart.
libraries, packages
integrated dependency management with pub package manager
class based instead of prototype based
scopes of variables as one would expect in a modern language
static syntax check
better tooling support like code completion
I am new to development and would like to develop an android application. I have previously built an application with Adobe Flash Builder 4.6 with Flex Mobile Project. I just recently noticed in 4.7 there is an option for Action Script Mobile Project.
Can someone please explain to me the difference between the two and the pros and cons to utilizing either or?
Pros:
Creating a Flex mobile project is easier (use Flex 4.6 with design mode to rapidly prototype, 4.7 to develop) and visually let's you drag and drop
You can use data binding and other convieniant built in tools
Like anything else, there's good and bad about using the Flex mobile project as oppose to a complete ActionScript based solution. Mainly, it's a lot easier to customize your preloadeder, your splash screen and other features similar to tht like customizing how your application handles screen. Below is a couple pros and cons of using the Flex mobile version instead of ActionScript.
Cons:
Slower performance
Can't use Adobe Scout, it's an awesome tool for real time benchmarking and profiling. Using the built in one is ok but it doesn't give you theamazing information that Scout provides.
My advice: if you're savvy enough to do everything in ActionScript, then definitely create an ActionScript project, your users will love you for it. Plus, it's not that much harder and it lets you have a myriad of additional control over your components. Also, you don't have to deal with the overhead that comes with data binding ( it generates event listeners, get and set methods and you can create much more efficient ones on your own). There are a number of other things that benefit you by creating an ActionScript version like refactoring and better subversion but those are more of incentives than anything else.
If you plan on making use of the declarative mark-up, built in UI components, and data binding which the Flex framework provides then you should probably start with a Flex Mobile Project. The downside to this approach is that the additional scaffolding of the Flex framework will incur a slight performance hit and will increase the over-all file size of your project.
On the other hand, if performance is critical and you don't need the declarative markup, built in UI components, or data binding provided by the Flex framework, then you should start with a pure ActionScript mobile project. Really simple applications, games, or applications with highly customised UIs would be examples of projects for which a pure ActionScript approach might be more suitable.
FYI, you can use Adobe Scout on Flex apps. Apache Flex now supports advanced Telemetry.
You can also add advanced telemetry to any SWF with the SWF Scout Enabler.
I read this question but was somehow not satisfied with the answers.
I also quickly read (as suggested in that question) the last chapter of Marco Cantù 2010 Handbook, from which I quote the following (I think I can quote such a short text):
I [Marco Cantù] do have a lot of
investment in server side web and REST
applications written in Delphi, and in
the recent years I've started playing
with and introducing at conferences a
Delphi Web Application REST
Framework119 (that is, DWARF), which
at this time is still not publicly
available... simply because it is too
sketchy and unfinished to be
published. I've seen other ongoing
efforts to clone Rails in Delphi and
offer other REST server architectures.
I think that if you want to build a
very large REST application
architecture you should roll out your
own technology or use one of these
prototypical architectures.
Considering that I own Delphi XE Professional and DataSnap is not in there and I would like to consider to write large applications too according to the above comments it seems DataSnap is not an option.
Is there even a commercial solution for this? I don't want to consider "my own implementation of REST", I would like to create a webserver that uses some of my datamodules where I use the DAC I choose (Devart in this case).
Final note: my goal is to write the backend for a large web application, on the client I would like to use Ext JS 4.0, but I want to do all the client work in javascript, to take full advantage of EXT JS, so basically I need a webserver just for the data and tracking the state, not for serving webpages.
To create your REST services, try our Open Source mORMot project. Now it is a well known and stabilized project, used world wide in production.
You can use any DAC with the current state of the framework by implementing a custom TSQLRestServerStatic class (similar to the TSQLRestServerStaticInMemory class, but calling your DAC): so you'll benefit for the ORM and the JSON RESTful architecture, together with the high-speed http.sys kernel-mode server.
The SQLite3 engine is NOT mandatory with our framework, even if it was designed to work better with it.
If you will start an application from scratch, I think the mORMot is a good option if Delphi is your only option. If you choose datasnap you'll have to live with the problems of performance and stability.
I wrote an article on my blog talking about performance and stability with DataSnap (and mORMot) in large applications, you can see it on the following link:
DataSnap analysis based on Speed & Stability tests
I think you should have a look at kbmMW, there is a way to implement a basic REST server based on an event driven HTTP server.
Check news.components4developers.com news groups, there you will have a lot of documentation.
FireHttp is a high-performance Web server based on Delphi/Object Pascal language. It supports HTTP 1.1, HTTPS (SSL/TLS), WebSocket, GZip, Deflate, IOCP, EPOLL. It adopts multi-process+multi-threading model, has good stability and concurrency performance, and provides SDK source code. Developers can use SDK to quickly build high-performance cross-platform Web applications.
Although it is comparatively hard to write in C++ than in Pascal I'm really attracted by multi-platform support of Qt. I can connect to an MSSQL server running on Win2003 server from Linux or I can connect to a PostGreSQL server running on Linux. That made a plus when comparing with Delphi.
I'm trying to write sample programs to get used to the Qt and C++. So far I'm comfortable with the layouts and signals-and-slots mechanism (still double clicking the buttons to write event code though :) ). I wish I was using the SQL data in my programs as easily as in Delphi.
Is there any way that I can put some connection object, a DataSource, a DBGrid and a DBNavigator on to a form and go on without writing code? (For some forms it is really a time saver, a project with 300+ forms can be made faster)
I would like to hear from people using Qt with data from SQL servers.
You would have to write your own designer plugins to achieve that and make your widgets invisible, as there is no direct support for non gui components in Qt Designer.
However, writing explicit code in Qt (which is really a lot less work than in most other programming environments) helps the program to stay readable. Delphi projects with a lot of forms and components tend to become readable to the author alone, because dependencies jump across files a lot. If you store your forms in binary format, you are lost anyway, because you then cannot search your project textually to find dependencies.
Good design, which causes your code to become small and easily readable is necessary in any programming environment and makes aspects like invisible components in forms less important (though you will miss them for a while to come like I do).
So, unfortunately, you are on your own for the moment.
Besides the obvious differences between JavaScript and Java, what are the relevant differences in using either SmartClient or SmartGWT?
SmartGWT is the GWT wrapper for SmartClient, which, as you say, means that you're able to write your SmartGWT app using java.
From my experience the only difference that matters when you're programming is that the GWT wrapper is a bit more restrictive than using the js components directly. For example, programmatically scrolling a TreeGrid from java is hell, since the body of the underlying table (that you need to get at in order to scroll the blasted thing) is not exposed through SmartGWT, while it of course is easily reachable from js.
Overall I wouldn't base the choice between the js components and the gwt wrapper soley on these differences, but I would look at other factors in your project. Which techniques are you most comfortable with? How much custimization are you planning on doing?
In my case, code maintainability.
We are a Python house. But for client-side code we opt for GWT, initially with GXT, but now with SmartGWT.
We don't like Java, but we don't like JS much more, Order, maintain libraries for several widgets, extends objects to give custom functionality, etc. between doing this in JS or Java, the option was obvious, Java side. We write reusable components here, and now we write very minimal code for client side, only reuse components and use REST to comunicate with ours Python backends.
We know that SmartGWT is more verbose than SmartClient, but, with Netbeans autocompletion (some coleagues here use Eclipse) we have direct access to every method, documented, instead to go to the showcase or google every time that we need to test and try new functionality.
SmartGWT provides you the advantage that you may use powerful editors.
You can debug your own code easily (however it's not very helpful for diving into the smartclient code itself).
You have all the auto completion stuff of eclipse/netbeans at hand. When starting to work with SmartClient/Gwt it helps you find the things you are looking for because the editor can list you classes or the available methods and some basic documentation what the class/method actually does. Saves you a lot of time crawling through the docs
Banang : API's to access ListGrid / TreeGrid body are now exposed in Smart GWT.
We chose to use Javascript (no SmartGWT) ... I prefer it that way, although some of our team members (newer to Javascript) would have preferred the SmartGWT way. Both have their pros and cons :
One of the advantages of using SmartGWT, is that you get to have compile time errors since everything gets compiled first by the Java compiler, before it gets rendered to Javascript.
One of the drawbacks of SmartGWT, is that it doesn't expose the full underlying Javascript Smartclient API. This means, if you want to do more advanced stuff, you might end up needing to do it in Javascript anyways.
Another drawback of SmartGWT, productivity wise, is that every single change you do and want to test, needs to go thru the painful Java EE compile/deploy process, whereas if you do it in Javascript, you can alter client side code faster by changing .js files directly without the need for the whole compile/deploy process.
SmartGWT is based on java code and when compiled it transforms it into java script, is a
heavy since it transforms java code into js
SmartClient is a framework based on js, you can use its components in an xml page and you manipulate them in Js, and it’s light
le showcase de smartclient
I recommend smartClient