TMS WEB Core v1.8 Sirolo is released!

We are excited to inform that TMS WEB Core v1.8 Sirolo is released today. This new version is the result of months of hard work of the team to bring several new milestones. Take advantage of the summer-time to expand your horizons and dive into the wonderful web world for Object Pascal developers. 
Here is a brief overview of the core new features included in TMS WEB Core v1.8 

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 stunning 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. In addition, a new API is added to retrieve operating system version information about the operating system where the Miletus executable is running.

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 choice 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 still from time to time needed in specific communication protocols, we extended the TWebCrypto component that is internally using the browser crypto API to also offer SHA1 support.

Previously available as classes, this is now more convenient to use as non-visual components with the new OnChange event exposed to let your app become aware when other instances have changed the local or session storage.

TWebStringGrid, TWebDBGrid have been improved and new properties to set selection color, selection text color, grid line color, border color have been added. A new event OnClickCell was also added.

Now it is easier to load a TFrame also dynamically at runtime with the new CreateNew() constructor. The TWebMemo has a SpellCheck property to control whether the browser should use its integrated spell check on the memo content or not.  The TWebClientConnection that bridges a TWebClientDataSet to a server offers settings for using custom HTTP(s) commands as well as set PostData for the HTTP(s) POST request. The TStringList got a promise based LoadFromFileAsync() method to use file loading in combination with await(). For the TBitmap, there is now access to the opacity value per pixel...

TMS WEB Core v1.8 Sirolo release is now available to all TMS WEB Core or TMS ALL-ACCESS users with an active license. Download the new version after login on our website or via the TMS Subscription Manager. If you had a prior version installed, perform an uninstall first and then install the new v1.8. We didn't do breaking changes to APIs or class interfaces, so your existing apps should continue to run fine with the new version.

The next step is bringing TMS WEB Core for Visual Studio Code on par with its Delphi companion by also integrating Miletus support. You can expect a beta for TMS WEB Core for Visual Studio Code very soon. At the same time, our team is already heavily researching key v1.9 new features, some of which are ground-breaking. We aim to bring some more hot news about it this summer!

Holidays are a good period to learn and get your feet wet with TMS WEB Core. There are plenty of resources to get started:

1) TMS WEB Core book from colleague, expert and evangelist Holger Flick:

2) Webinar replays about TMS WEB Core you can find on our TMS Web Academy (fully developed with TMS WEB Core by the way)

3) TMS WEB Core training course offered by our colleague Wagner R. Landgraf 
4) Over 100 sample projects included in the product (see in C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\tmssoftware\TMS WEB Core\Demo folder)
5) Over 100 blog posts about TMS WEB Core 

6) Tons of instructional videos we created
7) Consult with our partners

We create TMS WEB Core with love for you so we love to hear your feedback, your comments, your inputs, your ideas. Tell us about your experiences, tell us what we can do better, what new features you wish, let fellow Delphi developers see what exciting projects you created with TMS WEB Core! Our team is listening.