Meetings 2023

Agenda & Information for the Meetings held in 2022.  See Next Meeting for next meeting.
For each of the meeting dates there is a link to the meeting summary.

See Downloads 2022 for the available files associated with the meetings

13th Nov 2023

Agenda

  • An Introduction to Mammoth – A Climate Action Cinema – Patrick Hort
    Savoy Systems Ltd has been providing Ticketing and Retail POS Software (called Oscar) to cinemas in the UK for over 15 years, so when a 22 seat cinema in their home town of Nottingham came onto the market, it seemed rude not take it on! The cinema used to be in the Guinness  Book of World Records as the world’s smallest cinema, and Patrick is now running it to use film as a way of starting conversations and inspiring action around the Climate Crisis.
  • A Blazor Recap – Dave Capps
    Blazor is Microsoft’s answer to writing rich web application without the need to write Javascript; instead you write C# to bring client-side interactivity to HMTL pages. Dave covered Blazor in some depth at an earlier Dev Group Meeting, and will be providing a reminder of what it is and how you might use it – because we’ve been using extensively to revamp Oscar.
  • Oscar – from VCL to the Web with Blazor – David Mew, Patrick Hort, Dave Capps 
    Oscar, Savoy Systems’ Ticketing, Retail and CRM system, is written in Delphi and sits on an ORM created by Patrick in the dim distant past. Over the last five years, the ORM has been ported to C# and Dave has designed a platform-neutral UI framework in C#. The team have now used Blazor to implement a rich web interface to replace the Oscar Delphi Desktop Client, and David has been responsible for making it look thoroughly modern and beautiful! We are now rolling it out the first features to customers, while we continue to port the rest of the Delphi UI to Blazor. We’ll give you an overview of the Oscar architecture and show you how we’re making the move from Windows Desktop to Web using C#.
  • A Delphi Mobile app development walk through – Dave Akerman
    This talk will show the development of a mobile app with deployment on an Android device, and the steps to go through to get that app published in the Google Play store. Along the way it will cover some differences between VCL and FMX, UI on mobile devices, FMX styles, design time views, testing during development, device testing via USB or network, interfacing with GPS and other phone sensors, USB, Bluetooth and BLE devices, file storage, invoking other apps with intents, app permissions, splash screens and icons, app and file deployment, preparing for the app store.

11th Oct 2023

Agenda

  • Hypermedia, HTMX and RAD Studio – Glenn Dufke
    • Developing for the web has become increasingly complex, let alone confusing, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
      Often, a heavy SPA (Single Page Application) framework like React, Angular, Vue etc. are believed to be the only way to produce somehting for the web.
      To many’s surprise, Delphi is perfectly capable of developing for the web and in this session, we’re diving into an alternative – The htmx library!
      Htmx has been around for many years, but in the recent months has gained a lot of popularity for its simplicity and allowing us developers to go back to the roots (writing html) but turbocharging html with functionality similar to heavy SPA apps. This is accomplished through easy to read and understand attributes, combined with the compact library, we can send html over the wire and use our favorite language on the backend with a template engine of choice. This allows us to let the server do the grunt work and reuse business logic.
      In this session we’re touching in on Delphi MVC Framework, Delphi-Mustache and Pure CSS.
  • Book Review “Delphi Legacy Projects” by William Meyer – Adam Brett
    • Meyer’s book was published fairly recently and caught my eye as the blurb said it focused on solving real-life problems coding large and long-lived Delphi projects. It is packed with insights, although it has a few flaws. The session will run through a useful handful of really valuable tips I learned whilst reading it, and give an outline of chapter content.
  • Application Foundation – Rob Lambden
  • Open Mic for Mote /Fleck/Gobbit/Tools / Tricks

12th Sept 2023

Agenda

  • Home Creating custom functions for Excel in Delphi using XLLs (Excel DLLs) – Conrad Vermeulen
    • Understand how user defined functions in XLLs work, and how Delphi can simplify the boilerplate with the help of RTTI.
  • A talk about talks (Salamanca, Code Camp etc) – Richard Hatherall
  • Debug locking classes that log messages when they timeout due to deadlocks – Richard Marsden
  • Open Mic for Mote /Fleck/Gobbit/Tools / Tricks

17th July 2023

Agenda

  • Home Automation with Delphi, MQTT and Home Assistant – David Akerman
    • How to introduce monitoring, control and automation using open systems and Delphi.
  • Fast Fourier Transform – Kevin Bond
  • Auto archiving database data to keep all versions – Andrew Cutforth
    • Using a MySql database I will show a system to auto archive after every action that happens to a record in a table. When an add, change or delete happens the record will be archived along with date/time and who made the change.  This would allow auditing, bug tracing, and recovery of data.
  • Open Mic for Mote /Fleck/Gobbit/Tools / Tricks / Tick

14th June 2023

  • How Delphi is used in Gooch & Housego – Paul Woodhams
    The talk will show areas of production (photos of processes) and what software apps are generally in use along with an overview of multi-site database access.  Delphi interfaces with manufacturing equipment for our fibre products.
  • Amazon Cognito in Delphi – Richard Hatherall
  • Open Mic for Mote /Fleck/Gobbit/Tools / Tricks / Tick

16th May 2023

  • An introduction to Anotnio Zapater – Pre-sales Consultant at Embarcadero Technologies
    Introduction about myself and my background.
    Delivering Enterprise data via API REST in minutes. Introducing the new free RAD Server Lite edition.
  • Exercise Timer Code Huddle – led by Neil Parrish
    During Lockdowns Neil developed a basic exercise timer for use with routines from his gym. He has challenged the group to make it better: Ian Paul & Martin will show what they have done with it
  • Open Mic for Mote /Fleck/Gobbit/Tools / Tricks / Tick

17th April 2023

Agenda

  • Delphi Powered Web Server with Server Side Scripting in Delphi – Rob Lambden
  • A Brief Refresher on WebBroker – Robert Evans
    Revisiting an old friend with a few simple examples
  • Open Mic for Mote /Fleck/Gobbit/Tools / Tricks / Tick

Wed 15th March

Agenda

  • Reflections on Working with Legacy Applications – Ian Walker
    Having worked on a number of legacy systems that can trace their roots back to the early days of Delphi, I have a few observations about such work and my experiences.  What are the problems and issues commonly encountered in working on legacy applications and the causative factors we should be avoiding in new projects? What are the constraints that affect working effectively on such systems? Management approaches encountered. Recommended Reading.
  • The Bootstrap Library – Will Watts
     Bootstrap is a CSS library, born in pre-Musk Twitter, with a wider application than pure Web development. Will Watts gives a tour, and explains some of its advantages and shortcomings.
  • RADStudio 11.3 – has arrived and so we will probably have an open session on this, unless there is nothing to talk about OR we exhaust it in the News chat
  • Code Huddle Primer – Neil has raised an interesting topic for a code huddle and we may have a short discussion on the topic and mechanics to run it into a following meet.
  • Open Mic for Mote /Fleck/Gobbit/Tools / Tricks / Tick

Mon 16th Jan 2023

Agenda:

  • Clean Code with Delphi – Marco Geuze
    Writing Clean Code using Delphi will help you to be a better developer. In this webinar we’ll cover various topics about clean code. We’ll talk about some general principles, and how to implement this in Delphi.
  • Programming a balloon tracking system in Free Pascal and Delphi – Dave Akerman 
    I show how to build a balloon tracker and how to set up a dev environment for Raspberry Pi and PC/Mac, how to program the GPS and radio in the tracker, and how to code the complete tracker. I also show how to connect a radio receiver to a PC and write a simple receiver program in Delphi.