Adam’s April 2020 Meeting Summary

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Agenda

  • Jason’s dramatic working title: “Meet Dave Millington…the man, the myth”; a brief history of; a day in the life of; role in EMBT; EMBT passion; ask me Q’s
  • Webcore – Ian Hamilton
  • A quick intro to what it is, how I think it works and what I have found while using it.
  • Q&A / TMS Development – Bruno Fierens

Adam’s Summary

News

UK Dev Group April Meeting Notes

A second on-line Zoho meeting, hosted by Jason. Felt like a decent attendance, but of course it is far harder to tell who is present virtually. It is clearly a lot of work for Jason, holding onto multiple threads: Slack, Zoho, Questions, managing speakers and so on simultaneously … but overall the day worked well.

I think we mostly have the hang of Slack now, and Zoho works. The quality of screen-sharing is really high, the only issue is a few lost mouse-pointers. Keeping Attendees muted minimized feedback and greatly improved sound.

I don’t especially like Slack. It doesn’t seem to populate in a very useful way, with members adding Threads and Comments on threads a bit indiscriminately, and it is hard to see the content of multiple threads. I didn’t really feel I could contribute to the sessions well from Slack.

I would support trialling MS Teams at the next meeting. Jason could give a “using MS Teams” talk (nudge-nudge), circulate an email on how to join and where we can find basic “how to” training in advance. I would be grateful for the chance to learn about MS Teams, and if we didn’t like it we could always revert to Slack.

David Millington: A day in the Life
David was formerly of Parnassus software: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxHypjE3DEs, now a core part of the EMB Delphi IDE Dev team. He has a long history of development with C++ and Delphi.

As an internal EMB Delphi developer David was able to give a useful informal session looking “inside the box”. It was light on content, but good to hear how EMB are working (using tools like Ranorex & Jera). There does seem to be an awful lot EMB staff are not allowed to talk about, which I find a bit frustrating.

Dave Martel brought up Assembla, another Idera company, who host source-code in a somewhat GIT-like way. David Millington said that newer parts of Delphi core source code is hosted by Assembla.

Members made comments about how useful it is to join the EMB beta program, but that joining it is a bit hit and miss. Several members have tried to join the beta program and just not received invitations or been invited in the past then not invited again. Jason said the basic mechanism for joining the Beta program was that you have to be on software assurance and then to email Sarina Dupont at EMB. Members said they had done this with mixed results.

Ian Hamilton: Using TMS Webcore
Ian demoed the TMS suite of web-development components, which we have reviewed and discussed in previous meetings. He has spent a good deal of time struggling with TMS Webcore and has mixed feelings about it. There are some “super gotchas”, like your website just not displaying in older browsers, without warning or error message. Ian is a self-confessed “Delphi-centric”, and therefore some of his issues (shared by most of us) derive from the steep learning curve transitioning to the web-world. Since most of us are doing the same thing his learning was valuable for us to share.

Webcore is really massive. Ian showed a handful of issues. There would be opportunity for whole days of sessions even just on sub-sets of webcore components.

Bruno Fierens: Webcore Q&A
Bruno gave a really powerful talk about how to use Webcore from the inside as its architect. This included how to work with the HTML files Webcore generates to bootastrap styling, layout and HTML content in a more “webcentric way”.
VS Code is the ideal place to review and edit this HTML, as it can render it really fully, and Bruno demoed doing this to generate a responsive web-page with Delphi written event-handlers.
It was great to see a project being written in Delphi, with HTML visible and editable in VS Code. This definitely gives a vision for a working environment which seems powerful and flexible.
Bruno showed this template/bootstrapped-based HTML development by using free resources from https://dashboardpack.com. “ID” tags can then be added in the HTML and accessed (with live references at design-time!) from Delphi.
Bruno also showed a WebItemsActionList component which can have Actions added that link to actions called in HTML, showing a more “HTML first” development orientation, which would allow us as Delphi developers to add our work to the work of web-centric customers.

Bruno shows the many and varied Webcore demos which are available from:
https://www.tmssoftware.com/site/tmswebcoreintro.asp
I will definitely be taking some time to review these demos, as there is a massive depth to the product.

The meeting over-ran, which I am sure is a good sign. We had a couple of new (remote) members as well, which was great. Welcome to Tamas Nagy … sorry we couldn’t answer your question on WebRTC!