The conference is organized by S&S Media and supported by Embarcadero/CodeGear.

We have got all the top speakers, including Cary Jensson, Marco Cantu and Ray Konopka.

Many (most?) members of Delphi R&D team (including Barry Kelly – “The Delphi Compiler”) will be at the conference and there will be of course "Meet the Team" sessions.

All Sessions are online and registration is now open. The speakers list includes all those who already submitted their bio and photo. For a complete list of speakers please refer to the list of sessions for now.

If you register before April 10th, 2009, then you can take advantage of the Early Bird rebates.

When : May 13 – 16, 2009
Where: San Jose, CA, USA

More information: www.delphilive.com

S&S Media is a book/magazine publisher and software conference organizer. S&S is well known in the Delphi community for their Delphi focused "EKON" conferences and "Entwickler" magazines.

For comments, questions or concerns you may use the contact form on the DelphiLive web site, or just leave a comment here.

As an Advisory Board member I am proud to post this official pre-announcement for the next, long awaited physical Delphi conference.

Where: San Jose, CA, USA
When: May 13th – 16th 2009
Who: All Delphi developers, let it be Delphi Win 32, Delphi Prism or Delphi for PHP ones.

We will try to get all the known top speakers, from the US and Overseas to make this event absolutely rocking. The conference will be organized by Software & Support Verlag, supported by CodeGear / Embarcadero. San Jose was chosen as location as it is close to CodeGear’s HQ, so that CodeGear staff can show up easily.

Attendees

For now, block this event in your calendar if you are interested. We will keep the price affordable – details will be posted asap.

To register, please go to the DelphiLive 2009 Website – which will go online in the next two weeks. We will send announcement emails through CodeGear’s Developer Network as soon as registration is open. Make sure you are signed up at CodeGear Developer Network and CDN emails are not blocked by your spam filters.

Speakers

If you want to present sessions at Delphi Live 2009, then please stay tuned for the official Call For Papers, which will be made public in the next 2 days or so.

Topics

We will cover from basics to advanced topics all around Delphi. The final topic list will be made available as soon as the call for papers is closed.

Following is a draft of tracks:

• Architecture / Design
• OOP
• Database
• IDE, Tools & Components
• Core Development
• Basics / Fundamentals
• Native Delphi
• Delphi Prism
• Delphi & .NET
• Delphi & Web
• Delphi & PHP
• Delphi & Ruby on Rails

If you have suggestions for specific topics you would like to be covered (and which you do not want to present yourself), then feel free to post these suggestions as comments to this blog. The same goes for speakers which you would definitely like to see in San Jose.

If you create IWRadioButtons dynamically, then also be careful that you always set their “Name” and “Value” properties to the same value – unless you know what you are doing. Value is important for correct control and group recognition during postbacks. Sounds odd but has to do with the way how the underlying INPUT HTML controls are working.

Unfortunately, at least in IntraWeb 9.0, IWRadioButtons synchronize Name and Value at design-time only (no idea why – I cannot remember having touched that during my time at Atozed). The attached IWComRadioButton source file fixes that, so that you only have to care about “Name”.

Note: That file is for IntraWeb 9.0. It may work with older or newer versions, but I did not test that. This is not an official file version, but just a personal contribution to the freely available visual control source files of IntraWeb. Use modified sources at your own risk – the guys at Atozed can support their own versions only.

Often, certain errors such as missing images, non working JS files etc, pop up (i.e. customer calls and says “your Web app is totally broken”), and its very hard to determine whats happening. You could now add logging capabilities to your Web application and try to find out whats happening. That’s not a bad idea, but often it would help more to see what’s really sent over the wire, which resources fail to load etc.

Firefox: Firebug

For Firefox there is Firebug. Firebug is kind of a Swiss Army knife for all sorts of analyzing from within the Firefox Web browser. From JavaScript debugging, over JavaScript profiling, CSS and DOM explorer down to a network logger. For a nice introduction how to install and use Firebug see here.

The first thing you should always check with a faulty Web application is, if it loads all resources correctly. This can be done in the Network tab:

In this case the first two requests are answered by an HTTP 200 code, which means successfully loaded. The following request are all answered by HTTP 304, which means the resource has not been modified since the browser requested it last time. In other words these resources are cached.

Anytime there is an invalid request (wrong path, file does not extist), Firebug will mark that with an HTTP 404 response code, highlighted in red. This is very handy.

Internet Explorer: Fiddler

For IE there is Fiddler. Fiddler is a “debugging HTTP proxy”, which directly integrates with IE (but is not limited to). Once Fiddler is started from IE’s Tools menu, it willopen a port and automatically registers IE to use that as proxy location. (You can also register Firefox or any other browser to use that proxy) All subsequent requests will go through fiddler then, which generates well organized logs, like the following one:

This lets you drill down into the communication between your web browser and web server. For DOM or CSS inspection you would need an other tool though: Internet Developer Toolbar. And for JavaScript debugging you would need yet another tool: Visual Studio.

ServerController.ShowLoadingAnimation := false

If you are using IntraWeb’s PageMode then there is problem though: PageModus has no explicit ServerController.  Instead, an instance of TIWServerControllerBase is created when TWebModule is created. Inother words to change an option such as ShowLoadingAnimation you have to do that in your PageMode’s TWebModule:

uses

IWGlobal ...

procedure TWebModule1.WebModuleCreate(Sender: TObject);
begin
GServerController.ShowLoadingAnimation := false;
end;

Technically Atozed Software was a client of mine. I am runnning my own IT consulting business since 2004 and Atozed was one of my (bigger) clients since then.

After about 4 years of working with passion mainly on IntraWeb, which I still love and see as the best Web application framework for Delphi, I came to a point where technical innovation became more and more complicated with IntraWeb. Many new ideas were not easy to implement, as there are many road blocks because of historical reasons. A total rewrite would be a logical consequence, but that idea had no financially viable chance.

A while ago I got the offer to lead a totally new project. It was really a hard decision to take that offer and to discontinue my direct relationship with Atozed Software.

From August 1st, I’ll work on something new. It will be an exciting product and I’ll start blogging about this new project as soon as I have at least white papers and some early demos.

Don’t worry though!

My new project is still on Delphi, so I’m not going to leave the Delphi community.

I will continue to offer support and training for IntraWeb. If you need Delphi or IntraWeb assistance, on- or off-site, then just contact me.

I will cooperate with the IntraWeb Resource Center (IRC), which is a website offering support for Delphi Web application development. IRC is a place where you will find additional IntraWeb learning materials and information about IntraWeb support and training opportunities.

If you have a valid IntraWeb license and have support questions, then please see Atozed’s support options first. If you have specific support needs, which go beyond Atozed’s included options, then feel free to contact me or see the IntraWeb Resource Center. Individual support and training is available at hourly and daily rates.

Am Samstag den 14. Juni findet die eigentlich Hauptkonferenz statt, am Freitag werden in Zusammenarbeit mit der Entwickler-Akademie eine Reihe von kostengünstigen Workshops angeboten.

Ich werde folgende Themen anbieten:

• Hauptkonferenz
  • Internet-Protokolle mit Indy
  • Ajax Webanwendungen mit der VCL für das Web / IntraWeb
• Workshops
  • Praktischer Einstieg in Delphi
  • Klassen, Objekte und Threads

Weitere Informationen, Zeitplan und Anmeldung auf der Delphi-Tage Homepage.

Interestingly many IntraWeb users don’t know that there is a Compression option in the ServerController:

just set ServerController.Compression.Enabled = true and IntraWeb will compress all pages sent to the web browser. If the Web browser doesn’t support compression, then IntraWeb will of course detect that and send uncompressed.

The only requirement is to put a zlib.dll into the application’s directory. A working version can be downloaded here. No changes/settings on the client side are necessary.

There is one trade-off though which you should keep in mind: compression takes CPU cycles. Thats no problem for the client, but if your server machine is already close to its limit, then compression might not be a so good idea ..

Running IntraWeb applications right off your desktop is simple and fast. Just compile and run, and you have a working HTTP server. For production we recommend installing as service or as ISAPI application though.

Running a Web server on a Windows desktop – where you need to be logged in – is not what you want typically.

However, for product demonstrations, long testing sessions etc. it might make sense to use an IntraWeb Standlone application that way. You could even run an IntraWeb application right off a CD. For that purpose
we offer a way to customize the more or less ugly default Standalone form. This can be done by just dropping a TIWStandaloneServer component onto a standard Windows VCL form. For more details see the
CustomStandAlone demo, which can be found in the “demos” folder where you installed IntraWeb.

We just got a customer inquiry, where a customized IntraWeb standalone application raises an Integer overflow after “lots of traffic”. The customer is implementing an online game with many graphics transfered.

The source of that problem is a LogBytes rountine which counts the transfered data using an Integer variable. In other words, after 2GB of data transfered the application will show an error.

Note: This error only applies to Desktop Standalone Applications.
ISAPI and Service type Standalone applications are not affected!

The next minor IntraWeb release (9.0.40) correctly handles that situation, and the next major release (9.1 or 10.0) will upgrade the variable in question to In64.

If you are using IntraWeb desktop applications in the described way, then add the following to your custom Standalone form:

private
  FTotalBytes := Int64;
  ...

procedure TFormCustom.LogBytes(const ABytes: Integer);
begin
FTotalBytes := FTotalBytes + ABytes;
//If you want to display the bytes transfered, then call your update routine here
//Or more resource friendly add a TTimer that updates your Byte counter
end;

procedure TFormCustom.FormCreate(Sender: TObject);
begin
memoLog.Lines.Add('Server started');
memoLog.Lines.Add('Listening on port: ' + IntToStr(GServerController.Port));
memoLog.Lines.Add('');
GLogBytesProcedure := LogBytes;
end;

This can easily be implemented by using IntraWeb TIWMpeg component. Just drop as many instances of that guy onto your form as you need:

There are basically three settings you have to look at:

1. MPEGFile : There you have to set the file name which should be played. Remember that all files need to be in the application’s /FILES directory if you set the file via MPEGFile.Filename. You can also link to external files via MPEGFile.URL. In the latter case, remember to specify a full URL, including HTTP:// that is.
2. For sound files set MPEGFile.RenderEMBED to true.
3. To prevent the sounds to start playing instantly when the form shows up, we have to add AutoStart=false. This needs to be done by attaching the OnHTMLTag event:

   procedure TIWForm19.MPEGFile1HTMLTag(ASender: TObject; ATag: TIWHTMLTag);
   begin
     //Prevent playing sound when page loads initially
     ATag.AddStringParam('autostart', 'false');
   end;
   

   :   

IWMpeg can not just play Mpeg files (MP3 sounds, Mpeg movies etc), but also wav, mdi and other sound files. It basically depends on the user’s browser. I’ve successfully tested “wav” files with IE, FF, Opera and Safari.

This will render one “Play Button” per IWMpeg component:

Playing a Sound as Response to an Async Event

If you want to play a sound to “visualize” that an async event just returned (e.g. OnAsyncClick of a Button), then just do this:

procedure TIWForm19.IWButton1AsyncClick(Sender: TObject;2: EventParams: TStringList);
begin
  //Trigger sound to play when Async response is received by Webbrowser
  WebApplication.CallBackResponse.AddJavaScriptToExecute('BEEPSOUNDIWCL.Play()');
end;

This starts the sound for  a TIWMPEGFile named “BeepSound” once the async event returned. BEEPSOUNDIWCL is a “shortcut” to get access to BeepSound’s HTML representation. All IntraWeb components can be accessed in JavaScript by their name in upper case plus ‘IWCL’ (IntraWeb Class Library).

Download AjaxSoundDemo.zip