Delphi Flux application architecture

A good application architecture

Finding a good application architecture is not easy, but defining an architecture for your application is important: like it or not, every application is going to have an architecture.
There is no such thing as the Best Architecture, but there is the Best Architecture for your current application! (finish the project on time, with quality, less bugs as possible - no bugs preferred :) - and easy collaboration with your teammates).
Flux is the application architecture that Facebook uses to structure client-side web applications, is very simple to understand and there is almost no code for it. It's just a way to do things.
It’s a Clean Architecture so it’s not intended only for web apps, but its features and simplicity will allow us to adapt it very well to other kind of projects.
I believe Flux is very good choice.

Delphi Flux

Base Flux concepts, I created a project on Github Delphi-Flux-Seed. This project is an application skeleton to apply Flux concepts in Delphi applications. You can use it to quickly bootstrap your Delphi application. 

About Delphi Flux I held a session at CodeRage 2018, so you can watch the replay of that session at this link. Here are the slides of my presentation at CodeRage 2018:

ITDevCon 2016 - Next Week

Hi all,
next week there will be ITDevCon2016 and I'm looking forward to it every time I read the agenda!

Here some info that I hope you appreciate as much as I did:

• Speakers
• 15 speakers from all over the world (from Brazil to Slovenia, from Germany to Italy)
• Almost all the speakers are Embarcadero MVP
• Topics
• Last Delphi features
• Spring4D
• DelphiMVC framework
• IoT
• Delphi and Arduino Integration
• Firebird 3.x
• MongoDB
• Redis
• Web development with Delphi and most famous web framework (Angular, React)
• Mobile development
• Patterns and best practices (REST - Unit Testing - EDA )

There are all prerequisites to be a great conference! 

You cannot miss it !!

Simple chat messaging system with Delphi and Firebase

Hi all,
some time ago I posted about my open source project: Firebase4Delphi. Well, Firebase was acquired by Google and in Google I/O 2016 was showed very interesting news and new features (more info here ). My project provide a REST facade to consume FIREBASE RealTime Database API.

The Firebase Realtime Database is a cloud-hosted database. Data is stored as JSON and synchronized in realtime to every connected client. When you build cross-platform apps with our iOS, Android, and JavaScript SDKs, all of your clients share one Realtime Database instance and automatically receive updates with the newest data. - Firebase Realtime Database Documentation

In my project there is a sample application about a Chat messaging system. If you enjoy Firebase program (https://console.firebase.google.com/), you are able to create your first Firebase project! See the online documentation to undestand how Firebase works.
Once you create your application you can start to use the Chat Messaging sample, it's very easy if you follow these steps:

1. Create a clone of Firebase4Delphi project (or download it)
2. Open Firebase4DelphiChatDemo.dproj
3. Deploy the app on your favorite Target Platoform (Windows, Mac, Android, iOS)
4. Once application started, put in the settings tab (Fig 1) the URL provided by Firebase Realtime Database related to your project (Fig 2) , adding the demo name "chatdemo" as REST parameter
5. Choose a username
6. Click Start Chat button

Fig 1:

Fig 2:

DEB an Event Bus framework for Delphi

Hi all,
I have just started a new open source project: Delphi Event Bus a.k.a. DEB. As the title suggest DEB is an event bus framework based on publish/subscribe mechanism. It was inspired by EventBus framework for the Android platform.

How it works

DEB is designed to decouple different parts/layers of your application while still allowing them to communicate efficiently. The really exciting feature of this framework is that you can choose the delivery mode of the events: in the Main Thread or a Background thread.

Simply put the Subscribe attribute on your subscriber method you are able to receive a specific event, and by specifying the TThreadMode in attribute you can choose the context where to deliver the event.
For example, if you have to interact with the UI EventBus can deliver events in the main thread or If your subscriber does long running tasks (HTTP request), EventBus can also use background threads to avoid UI blocking. Regardless where an event was posted the EventBus will manage Thread synchronization, so you can deliver an Event in the MainThread and the subscriber will receive it on a background thread and viceversa.

Show me the code

Support

• DEB is a 100% ObjectPascal framework so it works on VCL and Firemonkey
• It works with DelphiXE7 and major
• It should be works fine also on AppMethod

Currently, the project consists in a simple getting started guide, 2 great samples and a suite of unit tests. There is a lot of work to do, so any contributor is welcome. The project is hosted on github and here there is the link. I hope you are excited as much as I am about this project!

Stay tuned!

New Delphi Demos repository

Hi all,
I have created a new repository on GitHub to keep all interesting Delphi demo that I have figured out. Here the link to repository. This is also a way to share the code with you, so it can be improved. The first project pushed is LocationSensorPatch, relative to previous post. I will put all my demo ASAP.

Firebase4Delphi - A new open source project

Hi all,
I have just started a new open source project on github: Firebase4Delphi. For those that don't know Firebase, it's a backend service: including data storage, user authentication, static hosting, and more. Go here for more info https://www.firebase.com/ . The purpose of this project is provide a REST wrapper (facade) to consume FIREBASE REST API. For now there is a client for basically interact with REST API and a ChatDemo example based on the official demo (https://www.firebase.com/tutorial/#session/sf2ovtgq4ko). The project use System.Net library, so is compatible from DelphiXE8. Anyone wants to enjoy this project is welcome!

My First Appmethod App

In the "bit Time Lab" me and my colleague Daniele Teti have developed an app to control a car via bluetooth with Appmethod, for Android and iOS (released soon) with the same codebase.

The main topics covered by the team are the multitouch UI and the bluetooth hardware interface using a true native app (no VMs, no scripting, no compromises). Below the picture of the app and the cars used.

The most interesting note was the time: we spent 7/8 hours to develop and build the entire system!

This project will be shown at the Rome Codemotion.

Here the video presentation of this project by bit Time Lab

It – could – work!