Delphi and Oracle

In may I make a 1-day training for the german entwickler-akademie with the subject "Delphi and Oracle".
I'll explain the database "Oracle" for developers with some dba-secrets, connecting Delphi 200x with Oracle-databases and more.
I love (and work of course) InterBase and BlackfishSQL, but many companies or authorities have Oracle in use and won't "insert" another database in the network / on the servers...
I will show that Oracle is a normal database and not a mystical software-product for dba-professionals only on this training. Introducing the architecture of Oracle, understanding the communication form the delphi-app with the database over the ora-client (and the oracle instantclient, which works with dbx4...) and creating trigger and stored procedures with PL/SQL, a pascal-like language.

Beside this Oracle-stuff I'll use and demonstrate dbx4 and show some secrets of this framework, like the handling of streams with dbx4:

FileStream := TFileStream.Create(EInfoPDF.Text, fmOpenRead);
TDBXStreamValue(Command.Parameters[1].Value).SetStream(FileStream);
Command.ExecuteUpdate;

Last week I finished a small (db-)application with Delphi and dbx4 and it's pretty easy to send (pdf)files into the database with dbx4 ...

And after this training I'll fly to California...
Why: A face-to-face conference for all Delphi-Developers around the world .... (great news that in US is a conference again ...)

Rave AddOns

Many developers have noticed that the Nevrona-Page isn't at the moment ready to use.

Especially the AddOn's aren't available. I've created a link-list to download the files from the nevrona.com-folder.

Rave 5:

GreenBar

Rave 5.0 5.1 6 7

GIF

Rave 5.0 5.1 6 7

JPEG

Rave 5.0 5.1 6 7

Grid

Rave 5.0 5.1 6 7

EAN8 Barcode

Rave 5.0 5.1 6 7

Datalinks

Advantage 6 7

InterBase

Oracle

If a link is broken please insert a comment here, thx!

And after release of Rave 8 Nevrona Design will activate the homepage again and this blog-entry will be obsolete;

Rave and the old preview...

Rave have since version 3 the same preview-form. Many users of Rave don't understand why it's not with a newer design available. 

First the BEX users have the complete source and on the other side (for BE-users and corporate-design-developers) you have with Delphi and Rave all the flexibility you need for your own preview in your application-form, with your look&feel.

In the following example you see how easy an own preview in your form is:

You must only insert a TScrollBox from Delphi and instead of the RvSystem the RvNDRWriter for the engine of your RvProject. To render the report into the scrollBox you need the RvRenderPreview-component from the Rave-register;

you can insert the componenta on your form or create on runtime:

      RvRenderPreview1: TRvRenderPreview;

    RvNDRWriter1: TRvNDRWriter;

    RvRenderPreview1 := TRvRenderPreview.Create(Self);

    RvNDRWriter1 := TRvNDRWriter.Create(Self);

Now you can show the report inside your application and don't need a special (old) form ...

procedure TForm1.Button2Click(Sender: TObject);

var

  MeinNDRStream: TMemoryStream;

begin

  MeinNDRStream := TMemoryStream.Create;

  RvProject1.Open;

  RvProject1.Engine := RvNDRWriter1;

  with RvNDRWriter1 do

  begin

    StreamMode := smUser;

    Stream := MeinNDRStream;

  end;

  RvProject1.Execute;

  // the report is now written into the TMemoryStream;

  // you can use the report for many things without regenerate

  // the report again!

  // e.g. preview, print and render into PDF/HTML or whatelse

  MeinNDRStream.Position := 0;

  with RvRenderPreview1 do

  begin

    ScrollBox := ScrollBox1;

    NDRStream := MeinNDRStream;

    Render;

  end;

 MeinNDRStream.Position := 0;

// here I use the report again for rendering into a pdf-file

// without regenerate it again ...  

  RvRenderPDF1.PrintRender(MeinNDRStream,'c:\hello_world.pdf');

  // with RenderPage you can define a page and only 

  // this page is   rendered:

  RvRenderpdf1.RenderPage(1);

end;

To navigate in your report you have the following possibilities:

  RvRenderPreview1.PrevPage;

  RvRenderPreview1.NextPage;

  RvRenderPreview1.LastPage := RvRenderPreview1.Pages;

  RvRenderPreview1.FirstPage := 0;

Here you get the total pages outside Rave:

    RvRenderPreview1.Pages

the programmers...

I noticed on delphifeeds this sunday morning the blog about "Do all great programmers start young".
Some month ago I found another blog: Can A Programmer Be Ten Times More Productive?
(it's from NetApp, a storage company with high-perfomance software inside to make all the possibility of iSCSI, SAN, NAS and so on availble).

I think with learning you'll get more and more skill, but to have more than other you need to look around your dev-world and combine all the complexe informations. Only with developing (in ObjectPascal) you're sometimes an expert in Pascal, but this isn't enough in our time. You need more than this. A good developer must understand the complete architecture and how software-products need to be developed for current and future needs; and this is very important for the complete architecture. And with the experience of many years you learn from the feedback of your customer the "usability" of your applications and beside this is the high performance software design only possible when you know more then (pascal)-programming. A reference to many other areas expand the skill day by day.
A good programmer brings a rare combination of breadth, depth and vision to his daily work and an architect or programmer must make many decision every day (also the explanations behind the decisions should be good / excellent) quickly and effectively and directs the product very well.
I always wonder about many programmers how they manages the spare time to be proficient in the current and future technologies which are happening in the industry all the time...

Delphi 2009 and Rave 7.6 ...

D2009 is a whole new game - Unicode and a NEW binary format and there is no simple update for Rave 7.0x BEX available. With Rave 8 BEX is a version for D2009 beside the included  BE-version available (if it's released from Nevrona Designs). I know, a lot of the readers wait for Rave 8 ... at the moment is Rave 7.6 the show stopper ....

Delphi 2009 is CodeGear's first release of a Unicode enabled version of Delphi for Win32. That is a very major change for Delphi and it has been (still is) a challenge. The first release of Rave BE 7.6 (bundled edition) included with D2009 has a few problems that were not discovered during the beta process. One problem is that there are some files ( .RVC and RptChart) that inadvertently were missed and not included in the installation program, meaning you're not able to use rave scripting in this version. 

Another problem is that "some" users are having a problem selecting a printer. I recommend to insert a "simple printer driver" like a HP Laserjet 4 and the IDE should start now.

Nevrona has already submitted fixes and CodeGear QC is reviewing the fixes and I hope they will publish very soon an update when the QC process is completed.

Back from California ....

Two weeks ago I spent some days in Scotts Valley, visited the HQ of CodeGear there again and last week I attend the oracle conference "Oracle OpenWorld 2008" in San Francisco.

Big, Grand, Huge, Oracle.
With more then 43.000 attendes was this a really big conference in downtown of SF ....

I spent a lot of time on sessions and on talks in the exhibition halls (yeah, I visited Embarcadero in Moscone south and talked to DavidI and AndersO).
On some sessions the speakers are afraid and worked only with powerpoint and prepared movies, no live coding :-(

Very interesting is IMO the idea and architecture of Oracle Beehive, meaning that Oracle plan a solution like Microsoft Sharepoint. The future will show the how it compared against Sharepoint and the market will accept/support this and not like the old unsuccessfull OCS from Oracle.
the secret "the X is comming" opened Larry Ellision on his keynote. The "exadata" combination from HP and Oracle should realize performance for (big) databases; we'll see it.
IMO moves Oracle with this from the virtualization to application-grid technology. Not that virtualization is out for Oracle but the combination from hardware and software and database have another focus.
It is sometimes interesting that a big company like Oracle publish solution like SecureFiles for the database that are a long time available in smaller databases, like BlackfishSQL (calles Filestreams) from CodeGear.

All in all it was a great experience for me and I hope to attend on the next OOW in October 2009 again.

EKON 12 - with a compiler engineer from CodeGear!

Today I visited the page of EKON12, the german conference for Delphi and all the other stuff from CodeGear. And, wooow, there are in the Delphi - area two very, very interesting sessions with Barry Kelly, who is one of the software engineers working on the Delphi compiler at Embarcadero's CodeGear.

Here are the details from the EKON-page:

New Delphi for Win32 language features

Barry Kelly - CodeGear

This session provides an overview of the new Delphi language features for RAD Studio 2009 - Unicode, generics and anonymous methods, and some intermediate and more advanced usage scenarios, including generic collections and concurrency idioms enabled by anonymous methods.

Advanced anonymous method and generics usage

Barry Kelly - CodeGear

This session covers more advanced usage scenarios for anonymous methods and generics. For anonymous methods, it will show a survey of closure-passing idioms as well as uses in threading: marshalling, futures, parallel-loop constructs. For generics it will be about escaping from constraint limitations via helper interfaces.