Delphi things planned for November

I thought I’d put a quick post here, partly as a reminder for me and partly to whet your appetites, for planned upcoming Delphi things in November.

On the 17th November is the “DelphiCon Worldwide 2020”. I am not doing any sessions for this as there was a specific limited and smaller cadre needed but there are some more events planned and I will be involved in them. You can read all about DelphiCon and register here: https://delphicon.embarcadero.com

Due to COVID-19 sucking all the joy out meeting up in person CodeRage has morphed a little into a new beast and it’s going to be a more hybrid offering of things like DelphiCon and a collection of related webinars.

I am planning:

A follow-up “How to use the Fluent UI look and feel with your Delphi apps” presentation. This will follow on from my previous session for the Desktop First Summit – Developing Fluent UI Apps with Delphi. This turned out to be a pretty hot topic with a lot of positive feedback. As I promised in the presentation I’m going to do a follow-up – a part two if you like – of how to actually code the Fluent UI look and feel in Delphi. The first presentation was specifically created for the Desktop First UI Summit and since we knew there were going to be a considerable number of visitors to that summit who were not Delphi ‘people’ I tried to keep the actual showing of the Delphi code to a minimum so as not to alienate them.

The Fluent UI with Delphi Part Two follow-up in November will be much more heavily code-focused with lots of video of the actual RAD Studio Delphi IDE with links to the Delphi / Object Pascal code to make it happen. I’ll also cover the components I used plus I think I might take a stab at trying to reproduce at least part of the effects using pure FireMoney FMX code.

Also, following in the theme of follow-ups I’m going to do a part two video of using Git with Delphi. This will build on my first video on the subject: Using Git Source Control with Delphi. You’ll find it, like the Fluent UI video, at the top of the Welcome Page in the RAD Studio IDE if you have it turned on.

For the follow-up I want to cover the actual Git workflow, branches, pull requests, merge requests, using GitHub issues for bug/change request tracking and other “how to actually use Git for real” type things. I notice on the Embarcadero Events page that fellow Delphi MVP Patrick Prémartin has a webinar planned for December 29th on the same subject. His presentation will be in French but I’ll try and get in touch with Patrick and see if we can’t co-ordinate some of the content.

Also, planned in November are some book reviews:

  • Books 1 and 2 by Holger Flick. I’ve already covered Holger’s excellent TMS Web Core book but blow me down if he hasn’t got at least two more to read and review. He’s a scarily prolific writer of demonic proportions. Clearly he never sleeps.
  • I have my hands on a copy the new Delphi book by the wonderful Alister Christie of LearnDelphi.tv fame. Surely by now you’ve seen at least some of Alister’s education videos? He’s been doing it for YEARS and he’s now distilled some of his epic knowledge into a book called Code Faster in Delphi.
  • And just because I can I’m also in the middle of going through a whole bunch of on-line educational courses from Wagner Langraf of TMS business components fame, especially XData. It’s going to take a little while to whip through the content since it’s extremely comprehensive but I reckon I’ll be able to produce a creditable review some time in November.

I have other things in the pipeline plus the usual heavy ‘day job’ workload – and to add to it November is personally a busy month since it includes the 11th anniversary of me emigrating from England and coming to live in the USA. It is also my wedding anniversary, US Thanksgiving (a big deal here, even with a pandemic) and my birthday too. Does real life not realize I have important Delphi things to do instead of celebrating and having fun?

Oh and the small matter of the US Presidential Election on the 3rd November too. At least I voted early so that’s one less thing to do. Election night promises to be a nail-biter. ?

Anyway – I’m off to get back to coding in #Delphi!

Book Review – TMS WEB Core Author: Dr. Holger Flick

Picture of Margaret Hamilton with a printout of her source code for the Apollo navigation system - source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Margaret_Hamilton_-_restoration.jpg
Not Ian Barker

I’ve become book-wealthy. This is the status you achieve when you have lots of books stacked up and their critical mass is such that they start to softly cry out to you for attention. I am the kind of programmer who revels in – and is still slightly awed by – the fact that he is paid to write programs when really it’s the thing he loves to do most in the whole world. Programming: I love it. I love designing code. I love writing code. I love writing about code and I love reading about code.

Right now, sitting on my “do this” shelf I have just shy of a half-dozen of Delphi coding books. New Delphi coding books too, not slightly moth-eaten getting-a-bit-out-of-date Delphi coding books. And because they are all shiny spanking new books, I’ll write some reviews here in case it helps you out.

The first one to join my wonderous collection is specifically about TMS WEB Core from TMS Software which is perhaps why it’s called “TMS WEB Core, Web Application Development With Delphi by Dr. Holger Flick”.

Before I dip into the review, I feel I should point out a few things. Those of you who follow along with the Embarcadero Webinars and conferences may have seen me talk about TMS WEB Core before. I make no secret of the fact I think it’s an excellent framework. You may even have seen me jointly present a couple of videos with the author, Dr. Holger Flick. Holger and are friends. We originally bonded over our shared love of Delphi and as fellow MVPs based in the USA; but we share some other interests since we are both Europeans from slightly liberal socialist-leaning countries who are married to Americans and live in the Southern United States. It’s a challenge sometimes but I think we both like the sunshine here a little more than the wonderous damp gray of your average Northern European climate. That said, Holger is far enough away I can say mean things in this review safe in the knowledge I will be hidden in a tool shed before he can drive up and wreak Teutonic revenge.

Holger’s written style is, much like his spoken English, precise, brutally accurate and perfectly proper in the way only an English-speaking German can be. Where I err on the side of colloquial with a plump vocabulary of fluffiness, Holger writes like he cut each sentence into the paper with a razor blade. Given that he used to work for Borland in a QA position back in the mists of time it’s no surprise that he slots together the chapters and examples like a finely engineered craftsman. I know in the past he’s had some discomfort from someone trying to score low blows by trying to criticize his writing and sneeringly saying that “a native English-speaking author would have written things differently” but <politician mode>let me be clear</politician mode> that’s a stack of jealous, whiny, claptrap. There are some syntactical constructs Holger uses which are perfectly valid yet hint at his German origins but you’ve got to be a bit of a pedantic word wanger like me to be in any kind of position to throw some shade. As my daughter would say: fight me.

The book is written so that it comes in the form of sections. Each section starts with a contents page. It doesn’t include an index. Personally, I think an index in any technical book is, for me, pretty useful when it comes to the point where you’ve read the book and return to it later as a reference. It’s a lot harder to find “that bit where it tells you how to parse JSON” without an index. When Holger reads this, I’m sure he and I will have some kind of frank exchange of views but, to coin an Americanism, it’s a hill I’ll die on. There is a master contents page at the start which helps make up for it. If you’re an author and you’re reading this – add an index to your book if it’s a technical book. Please?

But this is the only thing I can waft a critical finger at – the rest is an absolute cornucopia of Very Good Things.

Honestly, it’s a cracking good book. It’s a solid inch and a quarter thick and covers just about everything you need to know with regard to TMS WEB Core ranging from installing and configuring it in RAD Studio / Delphi, through basics like a simple single page app, debugging, progressive web apps or PWAs, Electron apps (shriek!) to full client-server database-driven web apps, drag and drop, bootstrap, maps, interacting with web services and even the Swagger UI. There is more to TMS WEB Core. You could write another three or four books about it and still not cover everything. It’s a nebulous subject.

I don’t want to go into massive detail about the contents because it’s pretty comprehensive – but you will learn, with Holger’s help, how to go from knowing nothing about TMS WEB Core to being able to write fairly complex web apps using nothing more than pure Delphi Object Pascal code.

If you want to know some more detail go to the Amazon link here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B086G6XDGW/ their “look inside” feature will allow you to browse the full main contents page.

One of the key strengths of TMS WEB Core is that you don’t need to know HTML or CSS, although it helps, and you will be thoroughly shielded from the depths of unpleasantness that is JavaScript. You write regular Delphi code – and out comes regular HTML website pages with CSS and JavaScript, all ready to go. You either just put it up on some normal web space like GoDaddy or, (even better) DreamHost – or some other place with a webserver such as your a corporate intranet – and it works just like a regular web page, except it’s a program you wrote, using Delphi code. It’s magical. Holger fully covers this, of course.

This book, combined with the attendant code samples which are available online, as well as the excellent sample apps from TMS themselves, will get you to some basic but fundamental mastery of creating web apps using Delphi. When I have demoed Web Core in the past it always blows people’s minds that I hit F12 on the web browser, set a breakpoint and up pops lines of Delphi source code. Yes, you can set breakpoints and debug the website and it shows your DELPHI object Pascal code. It’s a total mind-frack. Add into that things like the TMS FNC Components and some database stuff like XData – and you have some true power going on there; in fact things which would be quite long-winded and fiddly with other languages such as .Net. With Dr. Flick’s TMS WEB Core book you’ll know how to do all of this and a lot more besides.

Book: TMS WEB Core.  Web Application Development with Delphi
Author: Dr. Holger Flick
Author Website: https://flixengineering.com/books
Available in: English, German
Amazon US Direct Link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B086G6XDGW/

For more about TMS WEB Core: https://www.tmssoftware.com/site/tmswebcoreintro.asp

How to give your apps the REALLY COOL Windows 10 Fluent UI look and feel with Delphi

Here are the slides and links for the “Fluent UI” session at the Desktop First Summit.

PART TWO OF THIS VIDEO CAN BE FOUND HERE: How to give your apps the REALLY COOL Windows 10 Fluent UI look and feel with Delphi – Part Two (codedotshow.com)

I’ll link to the replay here when it becomes available. Be sure to catch my other session: “How to terrify your users into submission and look cool at parties“.

I am also speaking on two of the panels this week too. Register now if you haven’t and catch the sessions ‘on demand’ and say hi to me in the chat window if you’re around for the panel meetings.

How to terrify your users into submission and look cool at parties

Here are the slides and links for the “how to terrify your users” session at the Desktop First Summit.

There’s a ton of extra useful links regarding UI and UX design at the end of this post.

I’ll link to the replay here when it becomes available. Be sure to catch my other session: “How to Give your Apps the REALLY COOL Windows 10 Fluent UI Look and Feel with Delphi“.

I am also speaking on two of the panels this week too. Register now if you haven’t and catch the sessions ‘on demand’ and say hi to me in the chat window if you’re around for the panel meetings.

(Photo by Maxime Roedel on Unsplash)
Picture source: https://medium.com/@artofofiare/neumorphism-the-right-way-a-2020-design-trend-386e6a09040a

Useful UI and UX links

Order Form Toy
https://codepen.io/jkantner/pen/xxVPbeB

CSS only elastic hover effect · Muffin Man
https://muffinman.io/elastic-hover-effect/

Wacky Buttons #3
https://codepen.io/AlexTaietti/details/rNewQgK

CodePen: Build, Test, and Discover Front-end Code.
https://codepen.io/

What’s a progressive web app, and why should designers care? | Inside Design Blog
https://www.invisionapp.com/inside-design/whats-a-pwa/

Building Spotify’s New Web Player : Spotify Engineering
https://engineering.atspotify.com/2019/03/25/building-spotifys-new-web-player/

Electron | Build cross-platform desktop apps with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.
https://www.electronjs.org

Electron Apps | Electron
https://www.electronjs.org/apps

Amazon.com: Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products (Audible Audio Edition): Nir Eyal, Ryan Hoover
https://www.amazon.com/Hooked-How-Build-Habit-Forming-Products/dp/B00HZY1N0K

Home | Laws of UX
https://lawsofux.com

A11y accessibility check for text colour on background image
http://www.brandwood.com/a11y/?ref=designgems.co

Fresh Background Gradients | WebGradients.com ?
https://webgradients.com/?ref=designgems.co

Beautiful Free Images & Pictures | Unsplash
https://unsplash.com/

Neumorphism/Soft UI CSS shadow generator
https://neumorphism.io/#55b9f3

My Experience with Neumorphism (tips and resources)
https://blog.uidesigndaily.com/my-experience-with-neumorphism/

Neumorphism the right way — A 2020 Design Trend | by David Ofiare | Medium
https://medium.com/@artofofiare/neumorphism-the-right-way-a-2020-design-trend-386e6a09040a

Neumorphism in user interfaces. How UI trends reach for inspiration… | by Michal Malewicz | UX Collective
https://uxdesign.cc/neumorphism-in-user-interfaces-b47cef3bf3a6

Skeuomorph Mobile Banking | Dark Mode ? by Alexander Plyuto ? for Heartbeat Agency on Dribbble
https://dribbble.com/shots/8557373-Skeuomorph-Mobile-Banking-Dark-Mode

Creating interactive web sites with Delphi

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.

This I deign, for delicious Delphi

I thought, given my past as a published poet, that I would at least use a more rare word in a title for a Delphi blog post I was prompted to produce and, with that, add some pseudo-pentameter look and feel. In short, having a little lyrical laugh, to show that density of prose and a divers or archaic choice of words does not always serve to promote clarity. To say more sometimes is to say less and by saying less I mean this to say you, who I choose to hope to help by writing will gain more when I write the right thing succinctly, without literary ornamentation and, I believe, even more is to be gained by you if I show you things, by streaming, either live or re-recorded so you can, should you elect, pause, rewind, stop, skip through any boring bits and get value from it in and of itself, as I, in my mind, perhaps in a folly of imagination, like to think you do.

What?

Those proceeding 170 words are a bit of a word spaghetti aren’t they? Here’s the thing (to be said in your mind like Adrian Monk) – I always, when I write on this blog and when I stream, strive to be clear and approachable. Not only that, I will try and be as honest as I can and show you code and techniques that are not fancy for the sake of being fancy – I want to show things that maybe you don’t know how to do (otherwise, what’s the point?) and will really help you, generally because they helped me.

With this in mind, August is going to be a little bit of a tsunami of me taking part in some streams. Texas is way too hot to go outside in August anyway so I may as well spend an extra amount of time scrunched over a clicky keyboard and putting my reputation at the mercy of several webinars. Ah, what could possibly go wrong? ?

Plus, it appears, that this brutal pandemic seems to be not quite ready to ride off into the sunset. Social distancing and the temporary interruption to what we’ve all previously thought is normal: going out, having a social life; even the simple pleasure of eating is curtailed – so we have a little more time on our hands to learn new things, myself included.

I really think Delphi is my super-power. If that sounds like a sales line, it’s not. If you watched the recent Fireside Chat session I had with Jim McKeeth you’ll hear me go into a lot more detail about what it is I do for a ‘day job’, my background and history as well as a few of my thoughts on Delphi and code in general. It’s that faith in the ability of Delphi to produce ROCK SOLID stable applications in a very short space of time using a language which has an elegance to it which totally clicks for me and has the power to Get Stuff Done that enthuses me to write things here and to take part in the webinars and so on.

So, all that said and done, what have I got planned for August?

On Wednesday 19th August…

How to give your apps the REALLY COOL Windows 10 Fluent UI look and feel with Delphi

(Note that I originally had planned this for 5th August but that proved to be too short notice).

Fluent UI is the new hotness. If you have a recent version of Windows 10 then you’ve surely noticed it by now. Buttons with very cool grad fills which follow the mouse as it hovers over them, icons which are either scaled vector graphics (SVGs) or are drawn from the epic Font Awesome set, plus a whole raft of other subtle and not so subtle gizmos like borders which add affordance to windows to help you spot which ones are active or inactive.

And I haven’t even mentioned the ‘acrylic’ look and feel where portions of your screen are semi-transparent and allow a portion of the background to show through, slightly blurred. It’s cooler than ice cold.

Fluent UI is, without doubt one of the best things to happen to Microsoft Windows in the past few years – and I’m going to show you how to do it, in Delphi. There will be a full blog post backing it up along with some sample code on GitHub.

Speaking of GitHub…

On Wednesday 12th August

Using Git source code control with Delphi and RAD Studio – all the reasons WHY and EVERYTHING you need to know

Over the past few months we MVPs have been canoodling together in our secret chat rooms and darkened corners of the web and we’ve come to realize something: there are a heck of a lot of people out there who either don’t use source code control or use it but have this horrible nagging doubt that they’re only using a tiny fraction of its capabilities.

It’s a common theme for people to say “I back everything up to an external hard drive”.

I live in Tornado Alley in Texas. In fact I’ve always lived in the most active tornado zones ever since I emigrated to the USA. Mother Nature can go from blazing hot sunny day to house destroying poop your pants F5 tornado in a very few short minutes here. That gives you a whole new perspective on whether or not your code is really backed up properly. Git and GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket or one of the many and multiplying git hosting services can make this sort of life-changing destruction less… terrifying… and, if you charge for your services, less likely for you to be sued.

But that said, the main point about Git is sharing code with others, controlling the chaos that occurs when you try that – there’s a reason why nearly all verbs to do with source code collaboration are aggressive: blame, force, commit (like a crime), pull (why not sync or combine?)

Rad Studio has all the things you need in it to use Git (and SVN but I’m going to focus on Git). I’m going to show you every single aspect of Git from the why to how to when. I’ll show you some very cool tools which will make the whole process a lot less painless. Git is notorious for being a little reticent to mere mortal programmers like you and I. I’m going to pull back the kimono a little in this webinar. Even Marco Cantu (who apart from being a Delphi legend is also a certified genius) said he was looking forward to the Git webinar. No pressure, Ian, no pressure! ?

and finally, Esther, we come to a webinar which we’re doing because so many people asked us to at a previous webinar…

On Wednesday 26th August

I’ll be co-hosting with TMS Product Evangelist Dr Holger Flick a webinar titled :-

Creating fully interactive web applications using Rad Studio, Delphi and TMS Web Core

If you’re a Delphi developer there are more than a few different ways of producing web apps. I’ve personally used the excellent Intraweb. I’ve also used Web Broker and Datasnap. However the thing which really clicked for me when I first came across it was Web Core from TMS Software.

Honestly, you pretty much write regular Delphi code, design the screens the way you would normally – and out pops a proper web app: HTML, CSS and JavaScript all ready to run on any web server. It can also produce Electron Apps as well as Progressive Web Apps (PWAs).

Holger will whizz through what TMS Web Core can do and show some excellent, easy to digest demos. He’s also got a few books available which will give you a leg up too should you need it.

So.. August…

All of these webinars will start at 11:00am CST, 4pm UTC, 5pm BST. You can check the times in your time zone via Embarcadero. I’ll update this blog post with the links when I have them.

I intend to write some fairly extensive blog posts to accompany the webinars. If you have any other ideas for Delphi-related subjects we could cover – let me know.

August is going to be an interesting time. Wait until you find out what’s planned for September!

Using Git source code control with Delphi and RAD Studio – all the reasons why and EVERYTHING you need to know

The replay of this webinar is here..

Why Git?

  • A lot of developers are not using SCCS even though they feel they should
  • If you Google “how do I use Git” there are a tsunami of questions and answers
  • Git dominates the open source and professional development ecosystem ▪Git is built into Rad Studio

Other Source Code Control Systems

Apart from Git there is also

“I don’t work in a team, why would I use a SCCS”

  • It’s all about the tornadoes
  • Fire
  • Theft
  • Foul-ups
  • It’s almost impossible to avoid Git – you will be assimilated!

What does Git actually do?

  • Tracks all the changes you make
  • Stores those changes as a viewable history, with comments
  • Handles changes from multiple developers
  • When used with a cloud provider – saves your code safely off-site
  • Allows you to create branches for bugs fixes or new features you are working on
  • Can merge changes from multiple developers and even your own branches into the main source tree
  • Allows you to easily revert bad changes or experiments which didn’t work out
  • Allows you to collaborate with major open source projects
  • Can pinpoint who made a change and therefore who to blame ?
  • Allows others to make changes to shared source code in a very managed way
  • Allows you to share your source code on public web-based services like GitHub, GitLab and BitBucket

Tools to make Git a lot easier

Git can sometimes be a little challenging to use ?

Installing Git on your machine

Use the official “Git for Windows” installer

Git for windows found at https://gitforwindows.org

Accept all the Git for Windows defaults…

Make a note of where it installs because you will need it later.

The default for 64bit Windows is:

 C:\Program Files\Git\bin\git.exe

It will install some other cool Open Source things too – including SubVersion!

After it Git is installed, check it’s working correctly:

Go to the terminal / command and type

   git --version

Git 101

Git keeps track of your files in a special collection / folder it calls a repository – commonly abbreviated to “repo”.

This works best if you keep all your source files for a particular project in one folder on your computer – one folder for each project.

Don’t worry if that’s not how you do things – there are ways around it.

For anything other a purely local set up you will need an account with a Git hosting provider

The main ones are

The local repo is tracked in the same folder it ‘lives’ in using a hidden sub-folder and some ‘magic’ files.

Everything else is just your regular Delphi source code, images and project resources.

Once you have created a repo in a project folder any changes you make in the repo folder are tracked by Git from then on.

  • Files that existed when you created the repo
  • New files created
  • Files deleted
  • Files edited/changed

This means everything including things you might not want to track – but you can tell Git which files to ignore, for example the _history folder contents and files ending in .~pas and .~dfm

Telling Rad Studio your Git settings

  1. In the Rad Studio IDE select tools and then options from the menu.
  2. From that menu select version control and then Git.

Remember the path I told you to make a note of when you installed Git For Windows?  This is where you need it ?

The user name and email are the ones you use with your Git hosting company and/or typed in during the Git for Windows installation.

Using Git – opening an existing repository

We are going to ‘clone’ an existing repository. In other words we’re going to copy it to our local machine.

So, first, select File, Open From Version Control from the Rad Studio main menu.

Now choose Git from the dialog which appears.

Now enter the repo’s URL and where you want it to be saved on your local machine

You can find the repo URL on GitHub by clicking on the “code” button

Other hosts are very similar – the keyword to look for is “clone”.

Success!

You’ve just cloned your first repository. 

If you look in the folder you entered in the ‘destination’ field when you opened the project from version control you should see all the Delphi code for the project there along with the magic ‘.git’ files and folders we talked about. If all you wanted to do was get a copy of an open source repo then there’s nothing else to do but use the code.

Using Git – creating a new repository

I find this is easier if you use one of the external tools rather than the Rad Studio IDE ?

  • You can either create a new repo from existing code

  or

  • Create a blank (empty) repo and then create a Delphi project in there

Either way you need to have an existing folder on your local machine to hold the repo.

I’m using GitHub Desktop.

I have put the name of the repo as the same name as the folder where I will store my source code.

I have chosen to create a “.GitIgnore” magic file with Delphi settings so it ignores _history and .~* backups.

Now my new empty repo is ready to use. 

All it contains are the ‘magic’ Git files and in this case an empty default readme file.

Currently the repo is local only – just on your computer.  Click on the publish repository button in GitHub desktop to make a copy of it on the cloud hosting company’s storage space.

IMPORTANT! Tick the “keep this code private” checkbox if it’s a secret/private repo.

Using Git – changes get automatically tracked

Using Git – changes get automatically tracked

At first the new repo has only one automatically recorded change.

It may show other files if you used an existing folder which already contained a Delphi project or some resources such as graphics.

As you start to work on your project and create new files they will be ‘noticed’ by Git and automatically tracked.

Using Git – saving the changes to the repo

Mark a batch of changes so they are saved into a history point is called a commit.

There are three ways to “make a commit”:

1. You can do it within Rad Studio Delphi itself by right-clicking on the changed file or the project in Project Manager and selecting “commit”.

2. You can do it via the Windows Terminal (a.k.a the ‘command line’) using the Git command line

3. Or use GitHub Desktop / SourceTree to commit the changes:

Whichever way you choose you need to add a “commit message”.

A commit message is a note to say what you changed and why.

These messages are visible to other developers who have access to your repo. 

For Open Source projects this could mean literally anyone so it’s best to keep the comments at a professional level ?

Using Git – YOU’RE NOT DONE YET

Even though you have committed (saved) your changes to the repo’s history log they still are only on your local machine.

In order for them to go up to the Git repo hosting space you need to push the changes to the remote copy of the repo.

Depending on what way you prefer you can either

On the command line/terminal you use Git push origin master

OR…

With Rad Studio, right click on the project root and select “Git” and then “push”, “from Repository Root”

OR…

Easiest of all, with GitHub Desktop click on the “Push origin” button

Using Git – You nearly know the basics!

So now we know how to

  • Download and install Git
  • Some popular tools for Git
  • What is Git and how it works
  • How to clone (get a copy) of an existing repo
  • How to create a new repo
  • How to commit (save) our changes
  • How to push (send) those changes to the remote (“origin”) internet host

Using Git – but there’s more…

Git has a lot of other things we’ve not shown yet.  These include:

  • Fetch – getting any new changes from a shared repo.
  • Pull – this is confusingly-named; it’s where someone makes some changes on a public or shared repo and would like you to merge them into the main branch of the code.
  • Resolving merge conflicts – this is where two sets of changes to the same file can’t be merged automatically and someone has to intervene to decide which ones to keep.

Branches and pull requests are the two biggest things you will need to understand.

Because we have limited time for this webinar we can’t show you everything so we’re going to do a part two covering the next stage: Collaborating with other developers using Git.

Good resources

Live webinar with Holger Flick demonstrating TMS frameworks plus two new books

This past week I helped host an Embarcadero Webinar with Dr Holger Flick who, like me, is an Embarcadero MVP but in addition to that he’s also a tech evangelist for TMS Software.

Holger has written some books on how to create Delphi apps using various TMS frameworks as well as their excellent TMS Web Core which I absolutely love.

The webinar is an hour long and you can see the official replay for it here:

You can get Holger’s books either directly from the links on his website here: https://flixengineering.com/archives/1290 or via various sites like Amazon. Visit Holger’s pages to view the details.

Live coding

A few of us have been getting together every Saturday and Sunday for the last ten or so weeks and playing around with live coding in Delphi.

We did this mainly to show some live coding in Delphi of various techniques as well as how to do things like a REST server/client at scale but also to show off some things like TMS Web Core which is a relatively new way of producing web apps using Delphi as the coding language.

This has taken place on Craig Chapman’s ChapmanWorld youtube channel. If you subscribe and hit the bell icon you’ll be notified the next time one of us streams. If you’ve not seen any of Craig’s videos/podcasts before you should pop on over. Craig and I are friends going all the way back to the late 90’s early 2000s when we used to both live in the UK and would rock up at the excellent Delphi User Group meetings at the POSK center in Hammersmith. Times have changed a lot since then. Craig and I are both now living in the USA and married to American wives with American kids. I swear this is something neither he nor I would believe if we could time-travel back to those days in London and tell our 90s ourselves that this would happen!

Others on the videos include Frank Lauter from Germany, Andrea Magni from Italy and I think even Jim McKeeth from Embarcadero in the US also popped in at least once. I apologize if I’ve not name-dropped others (for example, Gus and “The other Ian” both turned up to play almost every week) – in total we’ve collectively streamed 14 FOUR HOUR long episodes of live coding in Delphi.

We’ve been coding a card game and it’s taken ages, but we’ve kind of got to the point where we’re all going to move on to streaming about some other subjects. I will stream and finish the TMS Web Core client part of the game since we’re nearly done with it and it wouldn’t be right to just walk away.

Here’s a link to the most recent session. I’ve made a few changes since we did it – for example I removed the models.gamedata unit and put the object it contained as a field on the datamodule. I also changed the “type” declarations to remove the repeated ‘type’ keyword as it broke Gus’ brain to see them done that way. In subsequent streams I will put in the rest of the API calls and make the game work. I might also change the inner core to use a proper controller/data model/view with full dependency injection just to make it clear how it can be done despite the slightly weird world of Javascript placing its boots all over our lovely Object Pascal language.

A couple of notes about what’s going on in the stream. I am using TMS Web Core 1.3 running in Delphi 10.3.3 for the code. There is actually a version 1.4 of TMS Web Core out but I didn’t want to swap to using that as it was only released in the previous week and it does do a few things differently – although it also uses a later version of the Pas2JS cross-compiler which would have been helpful. Also, if I had been writing the server side (Frank and Craig did most, if not all of that) I would have used TMS XData and then linked the web client to the data using that in a cross-platform kind of way. I might do that on a stream soon just to show how quick that would have been. 20/20 hindsight is a wonderful thing ?

Oh and sorry about the glitches with the audio in the first 20 minutes or so. Craig – who directs and hosts the stream – unwisely got some swanky new audio interface stuff and then found out he needed a PhD in audio engineering to actually use it in anger. Stick with it, it gets sorted out as time goes on.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy watching a bunch of Delphi appear before your very eyes on a live stream. We want to do more of this – Delphi is just TOO good at being the invisible driving force behind a lot of products and applications out in the real world and a bit of live streaming showing what Delphi can or can’t do I think can only be a good thing.

RAD Studio Delphi 10.4

It’s coming soon!!!!!

So many good things coming in the next release of RAD Studio, especially Delphi 10.4. A ton of stuff will crop up in the next few weeks; blog posts, demos, videos showing off delicious things like managed records, the TTitleBarPanel component and many other goodies.

You’re going to hear a lot of good things about Delphi 10.4 – after all, it is packed with lots of new goodness; fixes, new components, tweaks, managed records (you’ll learn about these and when you understand, you’ll totally get why they rock) – but above all else the Shout From The Rooftops new feature is the implementation of a Language Server Protocol or LSP.

Why do you care about this?

Well, it’s not just that it massively improves the code completion and other in-editor helper functions which in turn improves YOUR productivity when writing code..

No that’s not it;

Nor is it that the “red squiggles” (error insight) will now vanish in a puff of smoke when there’s no error – or that they will remain and be a truthful indication of the ACTUAL state of your code’s correctness when there is a genuine problem

No, not that either.

It’s THE SPEED AND RESPONSIVENESS.

The compiler is already stupid, crazy, fast (you get used to this and it’s a shock if you ever dip your toes in another compiler’s sludgy response and teabreak compilation speed) – but LSP takes all this to another level. FAST FAST FAST.

The sad part is that LSP is so good at just getting on with the job at hand people might not notice in a few weeks time that this is the Oeuvre triumph of the 10.4 compiler team.