Earlier this week I presented a webinar with fellow Embarcadero MVP and TMS Evangelist Dr. Holger Flick about the superb TMS Web Core product.
You can view the official replay here:
TMS Web Core allows you to create fully interactive web pages using Embarcadero Delphi as the ‘back end’ programming language. When you hit the compile button instead of a traditional Windows executable being created you get instead pure HTML pages with CSS ready to copy over to a plain old regular web server – no further requirements beyond that.
The programmable functionality of the web application is delivered as a JavaScript file. You don’t have to write or even understand JavaScript – you just write Delphi code and the compiler converts that code into the JavaScript for you.
Web Core really highlights how easy and yet powerful the Delphi language is for writing programs. The ‘strong typing‘ is part of the secret sauce and the “R” in RAD truly demonstrates itself to mean “rapid”. Using Delphi you can frequently and repeatedly produce robust, performant and richly functional applications with embarrassingly minimal effort. Seriously, it’s sometimes a little too easy and you think to yourself, “did I miss something?” – but no, it doesn’t have to be hard to create applications – and TMS Web Core extends that understated power to creating interactive web sites using Delphi.
I can’t even begin to tell you how game- changing TMS Web Core is for Delphi programmers. There are creditable alternatives such as the venerable IntraWeb, but TMS Web Core feels a little more ‘right’, to me, and genuinely the experience is one of creating a regular Delphi application which just happens to pop out as a set of HTML pages. No mess, no fuss and easy to put up on to any web host on any hosting service of your choice.
I’m going to stream some more about this soon as I think the way I would present the product is slightly different to Holger – not better or worse, just an alternative angle!
Holger has written several excellent books on using Web Core and Delphi in general. He’s an excellent developer with broad experience, even working for a time for Borland. I recommend taking a look at the books by clicking here.