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BARNSTEN Congres - Paris September 2016 - Felix John COLIBRI. | 1 - The BARNSTEN Paris Congres
The BARNSTEN Paris congres took place today, September 15th in Paris BARNSTEN took over the Delphi distribution of Delphi for France in May 2016. The Haarlem (Netherland) based company company was created in 1984 and is
involved in Delphi since more than 18 years and has close ties with Embarcadero since many years. We were heartily welcomed by Raymond HORSTEN, Barnsten owner at the registration desk.
2 - The Keynote
Maxime CAPELLOT who is in charge of France for BARNSTEN and Pawel GLOWACKI, Embarcadero European Technical Lead for Developer Tool presented the keynote. There are the main points we remember:
- Maxime presented BARNSTEN, stressing their technical Delphi expertise and their commitment to promplty handle any technical support, be it with their team in Haarlem, or with the European and / or the developers of Delphi.
- the different new or extended features were presented :
- the Cloud, Baas, Rest, Firedac
- Internet of Things (bluetooth, Wifi, Beacon Fence, (IOT) capabilities were presented
- for Databases, new drivers, the use of the Rad Server
- the FireUi designer with single shared master and adapted descendent forms, to handle different device form factors
- Windows 10 support
- especially interesting
- the Berlin installer was changed to GetIt technology. The new tool is quicker then InstallAware (this should not be too difficult to achieve) and presents a window allowing to specify the details of the desired
install, with the ability to change the parameters and undo the unwanted items.
- we can again use a "floating form designer", (as in Delphi 6), which is a benefit for all mutliple monitor developers
- FireDac can handle the NoSql MONGO DB
- the roadmap was commented, with the expected updates and new versions. Linux server versions are announced
- the different levels of Delphi (Starter, Pro etc) as well as the contract
types and access to previous versions (version -4 for standard contracts, all versions for the "Amnesty" contract)
The detail of the presentation was handed over as a wearable wrist USB key,
containing the Keynote .PDF, a BERLIN 10.1 video and a 6 free months Blaise magazine subscription.
3 - Delphi Mobile App Felix GUILLEMOT presented a broad overview of an Oil refineries access tool his
team developed. The product is currently deployed, and uses many Delphi technologies including FireDac, DataSnap with callbacks, FireMonkey, TMS grids.
4 - TMS FNC
Bruno FIERENS, founder of TMS Software in 1996 presented TMS Framework Neutral Components. FireMonkey allows multi platform graphic components, but it is not easy to mix VCL parts with FMX parts. The purpose of the FNC is to allow developpment of a
single code base for VCL and FMX. The many, sometimes subtle differences between VCL and FMX were presented, then the main components of the FNC sketched. A taskbar with ticks and a thumb was coded. The main new components (grids, of
course, rich editors, list control boxes (an array of controls adjusting the distribution of controls to the form width) were described. An example of the TMS planner was shown.
Although the trend will be to develop TMS components with this new framework, Bruno agreed that VCL specific components could take advantage of Windows specific features like drag and drop.
He acknowleged that TMS was discontinuing the Fmx browser, since Delphi now contains one.
5 - App Tethering Didier CABALE, MVP Embarcadero, DCConseil, presented the key points of app tethering.
The main types of tethering networks were presented. The two Delphi components, TTetheringManager and TTetheringAppProfile were used in the first coded demo which was a launcher starting another .EXE. This .EXE requested some resource
from the launcher (a string in this demo). Another example with an application doing tethering with the Internet was presented. Performance, comparison with simple UDP or TCP protocols, reconnection functionalites were discussed.
Didier mentioned the papers of Malcolm GROVES and Steven BALL about App Tethering.
6 - Point of Sale Mobile Applications Florian LOUIS, Project Manager, Ginkoia, presented a point of sale mobile application family.
The software uses tablets and smartphone with bar code scanners and allow the emplyee to manage products and customers in retail stores, mainly in the sports domain. The architecture was presented : Interbase Database, Firemonkey for the acess,
business objects to represent the product, the customer, the phone lists etc, a DataSnap server with ServerMethods to transfer the objects to the mobiles using Wifi. On the client side, proxies rebuild the business objects which are in turn
managed by FireMonkey controls. The source code of a simple client / phone list example was analyzed in more detail.
7 - Remarks - we did not detail the keynote content, but the information is readily
available in many BERLIN 1.1 presentations, like the Docwiki
- here is a link to the August 2016 Delphi RoadMap
- BARNSTEN and Detlef OVERBEEK, the Blaise magazine editor, will organize next
week (20 September 2016) the PASCON Delphi Festival
8 - The author Felix John COLIBRI works at the Pascal
Institute. Starting with Pascal in 1979, he then became involved with Object Oriented Programming, Delphi, Sql, Tcp/Ip, Html, UML. Currently, he is mainly
active in the area of custom software development (new projects, maintenance, audits, BDE migration, Delphi
Xe_n migrations, refactoring), Delphi Consulting and Delph
training. His web site features tutorials, technical papers about programming with full downloadable source code, and the description and calendar of forthcoming Delphi, FireBird, Tcp/IP, Web Services, OOP / UML, Design Patterns, Unit Testing training sessions.
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