Delphi Time Machine

- or how to communicate with the past is possible - kind of...

I am a bit late on congratulating Delphi's anniversary yesterday - so what would fit better than inventing a time machine - or communication setup that could communicated back in time.

Self-updating Application with SHA1 check and FireDAC

- or basic self-improvement with room for improvement.

There are many ways to keep the users windows applications updated, like pushing them out via enterprise distribution setups, click-once, Squirrel (not the scripting language or the animal). But what if I just want the basics - and as simple as possible?

Disclaimer: This is not a post about security - even if SHA1 is mentioned - this is solely intended as an example on how an update process could be done in a controlled environment - like in-house distribution.

Integrating with your favorite CRM/ERP web based client

- or poor mans integration?

Sometimes you need to integrate to other systems in the organisation. And the ways of doing it always matters on which interfaces/skills/tools are at hand - but also whether you need a tight dependency and if you want or can customized anything on that client.

In the below example I will just illustrate how a standard Microsoft Dynamics 2016 CRM "Lookup Up Record" dialog can be used to link some other data/application that has interest in the CRM data - so that doing BI across systems might be more fun.

Setting up SUSE Linux Enterprise Server/openSUSE Server for the Delphi on Linux Beta

- or how-to setup PAServer on Linux.

Jim McKeeth mentions in his first part of getting ready to Delphi on Linux Beta, that you can use either Red Hat/Fedora or Ubuntu - and follows up in part 2 to show how-to setup Ubuntu Server - Malcolm Groves then supplements this with the needed setup for Fedora Server.

Even if the two distributions mentioned above seems to be the officially supported - there should not be any reason for not using your AMD64/Intel64 Linux distribution of choice. Since popularity can be based on region and industry - I think it is also relevant to mention SUSE and plain Debian.

I will supplement here with the steps needed for the SUSE variants, and installation of the PAServer on Linux.

Running Delphi applications on Raspberry Pi 3

..using RTAndroid 7.1 on RPi3 using ADB over network.

Update: RTAndroid has now become emteria.OS at https://emteria.com/.

Embarcadero has Linux (console) applications on their roadmap - but that is for AMD64 (x64 - see comments) only - read more about the product roadmap here.

Despite the above I did get my Delphi application running on the RPi 3 B hardware - read below:

Fallback for non-installed SQL Server Native Clients

- or how to survive in a world where you are not in control of everything.

Today I did deploy a small application that did connect to a MS SQL Server, so a driver was needed, and I do prefer to follow the recommendations on using the latest native drivers - and I also try and avoid ODBC as the plague.

What had slipped my mind until the first test user got an error - was that in a plain Windows installation only the "old" ODBC SQL Server driver exists - and since I really didn't want to involve the whole IT support/operation/packaging scenario - to get the SQL Server Native Client 11.0 client pushed out to some users around the world - who also would be lacking admin rights, so that they would not be able to install the drivers themselves - I had to include a fallback option.

I refuse still to understand why the newer Windows versions keep only having the old "SQL Server" ODBC driver and not also include a "native" one, when that is what is been recommended over and over again.

Why "browser" clients not always are a good idea

- or why you could/should consider a n-tier setup, spiced up with a briefcase model - part nil.

I haven't really been able to see the revelation in browser clients - and I am not quite sure why anyone would always consider this as a good option.

It might look tempting from an IT operations standpoint and maybe also from a management view - but would they have a chance to know - it is the users experience and productivity that counts - and that is what we all should care about.

So I would say that if the job the client needs to handle is comparable to an old VT100 dumb terminal - then browser it is.