TMS WEB Core v1.8 beta is here

It was of course highly anticipated and awaited, this new version of TMS WEB Core v1.8 named Sirolo. Sirolo is a small but beautiful town along the Italian coast at the Adriatic sea. After city Ancona (name of TMS WEB Core v1.7 release), it is a nearby little town the Mille Miglia race in 1955 crossed.

Other than the reference to this beautiful place, what does TMS WEB Core v1.8 brings on the table for Delphi developers:

After Miletus targeted Windows in TMS WEB Core v1.7, our team now accomplished the phenomenal next step to create cross-platform web technology based desktop applications for Windows, macOS and Linux. And all that with a minimal footprint. On Windows and Linux this means single executable file apps and for macOS the typical application folder but also here with a single application executable file. Deployment can be done via ultra simple XCOPY deployment.

In a nutshell, you can create desktop applications from a single source code base from your Delphi IDE on Windows. You do actually not need an Apple mac machine or Linux box to create these applications. The GUI of these applications is rendered in the browser and therefore empowered by HTML5 and CSS3. You can take advantage of existing web application templates to create wonderfull GUIs. 
Not familiar with Miletus? You can learn all about it from this webinar replay

In this new version, we added two more possible local databases that can be directly used from a Miletus application and that is Interbase and Firebird. No need here to create a REST API interface, you can directly connect a client dataset to local databases. In v1.8 this is now: MS Access, MS SQL, mySQL, SQLite, Interbase and Firebird. 

            

Convenient for storing application settings, INI files or registry is what developers frequently use. So, from a Miletus app you can now easily access these INI files and the registry in the same way as you can from a VCL or Firemonkey application. Of course, there is no registry on macOS or Linux and here there is automatic fallback on INI files.

We have added two new controls to TMS WEB Core v1.8. This is a chatbox control and a rating panel. With the TWebChatbox control, you can write web chat applications with little to no code. Drop this component on the form and all you need to do is write some lines of code to send the message to your chat server of choices or receive messages from there. The other new component is the TWebRatingPanel. This is the classic UI pattern of rating via clicking a number of stars (or other icons of choice). The rating panel offers setting rates in units of 1, 0.5 or fully fractional.

As SHA1 is often needed in communication protocols, we extened the TWebCrypto component that is internally using the browser crypto API to also offer SHA1 support.

Based on your feedback and that of our team, we did numerous smaller improvements to the components, we further polished the Object Pascal to JavaScript compiler and integrated the latest pas2js RTL.

TMS WEB Core v1.8 Sirolo beta is now available for all TMS ALL-ACCESS users with an active license. Our team is eager to learn about your experiences with this new version as well as about how work is going on your projects based on TMS WEB Core. If you have interesting projects that near completion, don't hesitate to get in touch for creating together a nice story about your experiences and results with TMS WEB Core!

First goals are to release TMS WEB Core v1.8 and at the same time bringing TMS WEB Core for Visual Studio Code on par with its Delphi companion by also integrating Miletus support. After that, our team is already researching key v1.9 new features. We can't reveal much yet as there are several still uncertain technical challenges to tackle. We will of course keep you in the loop as soon as we feel sufficiently confident about these! 

Holidays are a good period to learn and get your feet wet with TMS WEB Core.

Didn't have the time yet to explore the wonderful world of web development? The upcoming holiday period is the ideal time to broaden your horizons and start learning about TMS WEB Core. To help you, we can, while our stock lasts, offer  for European customers with a TMS WEB Core license purchase a free TMS WEB Core book written by our evangelist Holger Flick (books will be shipped from our main European office). If you want this book free, make sure to reserve your free copy via email and we'll confirm availability and ship your book upon receipt of the license order. Hurry, our stock is limited!

Meanwhile, enjoy a great holiday period, why not at the gorgeous beaches of Sirolo in Italy, and with this, this blog article is full circle.