Imagine

Imagine your access to functionally useful libraries, components, controls that are hard to find in the Delphi developer community suddenly became easily available.

Visualize

Visualize you had no more concerns what platform or what framework to choose for developing your next solution for your customers.

Dream

Dream you can start adding seamlessly exciting new functionality to your existing applications.

That is exactly the core goal of the brand new WX concept we reveal today with TMS FNC WX Pack. In a nutshell, WX means "Packaging Web technology in easy-to-use components for integration in any type of Delphi application".

With WX Pack, you can leverage existing Web libraries in VCL Windows applications, FMX cross-platform applications for Windows, macOS, iOS, Android & Linux, or TMS WEB Core Web applications for any device running a modern browser.

How does it work?

The foundation of the WX concept is our powerful TMS FNC Browser component with its accompanying bridge technology. The FNC browser wraps the native operating system browser for the VCL, FMX, or LCL framework and offers a sort of virtual embedded browser in a TMS WEB Core Web application. This FNC browser is used to host a Web library with the choice to host it for offline or for online use. You can opt for online use to make the component lighter or offline use which means that the component will take up somewhat more size in your executable (depending on the component of course) but with the guarantee it will run fine without an Internet connection. Thanks to the FNC bridge technology, the native application-level component can communicate with the browser hosted library and vice versa. As a Delphi developer, this is all abstracted and you only deal with it at Object Pascal level as a component and its properties, methods, and events.

Where do we start?

There is an abundance of existing Web libraries, so where to start was the big question. The answer was simply listening to you, the user. For quite some time, among the most popular requests for new components were a barcode generator component, a QR code generating component, an HTML editor, a PDF viewer, ...

And so, that is exactly where we started our research and initial development to bring these components as part of the WX concept. It enables us to deliver these kinds of components in a fraction of the time otherwise needed to build them from the ground up, and it is an opportunity to leverage proven, well-tested, and widely popular existing libraries.

The first group of components

In the first beta build of TMS FNC WX Pack, we have:

TTMSFNCWXBarCode
This components offers close to hundred different barcode types with lots of customization properties for these barcode types.

TTMSFNCWXQRCode
Component to generate QR codes of different type and with several customizations like logo in QR code for example

TTMSFNCWXHTMLMemo
Edit HTML directly with the TTMSFNCWXHTMLMemo component. It has an optional embedded format toolbar or can be used with external toolbar. Programmatic access to all formatting capabilities is available. Content is loaded and saved directly as HTML.

TTMSFNCWXPDFViewer

With this component on the form, you can display PDF files in your applications, including page thumbnails. There is programmatic access to navigate through pages, search text, ...

TTMSFNCWXCamera

Access your device camera with the TTMSFNCWXCamera component and programmatically take pictures

Curious?

Eager to see it in action, check our first video we prepared:

Availability?

The first beta build is available for all TMS ALL-ACCESS users with an active license. You will find this beta build in your account, or you can access it from the TMS Subscription Manager. You can download this new product now and start tinkering with it.

What's next?

With your feedback, this will lead to the release of the first version TMS FNC WX Pack (v1.0). It will be available as part of TMS ALL-ACCESS, TMS FNC Component Studio, and as a stand-alone product.

In the meantime, additional components for TMS FNC WX Pack are already in development, and we will reveal these shortly. But other than this, it will be mostly YOU who will determine the future shape & content of the TMS FNC WX Pack. If you have the need for specific functionality not readily available in the Delphi component offerings but easily available for Web developers, let us know and our team will research wrapping it into a Delphi component with the WX concept. Leave a comment or send us a direct email with your ideas!