Brisbane Meetings

2007

27 August 2007

PHP Introduction for Delphi Developers

by Akash Mehta

This month the meeting will focus on PHP.

We will have Akash Mehta of the Brisbane PHP User Group as our guest speaker to give us an introductory presentation on PHP. Note that Akash will be demonstrating standard PHP for web development during his presentation (using Xampp lite), but afterwards there will be ample time to fire up Delphi for PHP and take a look at the new RAD IDE. 

We will prepare some basic database connectivity code for this second part of the meeting but I would like it to be audience-driven. So any suggestions of things to look at or try out will be welcome.

25 June 2007

PHP, OO and a lucky door prize!

This month (June) the meeting will consists of three parts:

A PHP discussion

With Delphi for PHP out I decided to visit our local PHP User group. They have offered to "borrow" us one of their people to give us an introductory presentation (later in the year) on PHP if we are interested. So in the first part of our meeting I will report on my visit and test our interest in PHP.

An Object Oriented Analysis and Design discussion

Grady Booch and some of his amigos have recently released a new version of their book on OOAD. Note that these are the people who brought us much of OO and UML. I will do a quick presentation with an overview of what Booch and amigos are trying to tell us about how we should create software. And then I would like to have a discussion about how this ties in with how we go about creating software in the real world. E.g. to what what extent do we agree or disagree; do we actually get to follow any of these principles even if we do agrree?

I also want to use this discussion to test our interest in more presentations on OO and Design Pattern related issues.  

Lucky Door Prize from Arena Business Technology

Once again Arena Business Technology Pty Ltd is kindly donating a lucky door prize. For this June Brisbane ADUG meeting it is a Belkin Surge Protector valued at $69.95. We encourage everybody to have a look at Arena's web site and at the brochures we will make available during the meeting because Arena is not only a regular sponsor of our meetings and symposia, they also give a decent discount to ADUG members.

23 April 2007

SQL Server Performance Analysis

Rob Risetto (DbWerx)

This month Rob Risetto of DbWerx will talk about SQL Server Performance Analysis.

Rob did a similar and well-received presentation before the Brisbane SQL Server User Group in February. This time we have asked him to allocate a bit more time to cover some of the basics for those of us who are not as familiar with SQL Server and its performance tools.

As usual before the presentation starts, we will first have a quick chat on some recent developments. And  if anybody has had a chance to look at Delphi 2007 for Win32 or Delphi for PHP why not give us 10 minutes or so to share your first experiences with us?

26 February 2007

.NET 2.0 for Delphi Programmers

Alex Fekken (Fekken IT Services)

2006

25 September 2006

Highlights from Microsoft Tech Ed for the Delphi Developer 

Malcolm Austin (REIQ)

Malcolm will give us the highlights of 3 days and 17 attended sessions. Some of the topics he will cover are: Linq, BLinq, WPF, .NET 2.0 and 3.0, SQL Server 2005, Orcas (next version of Visual Studio) and Windows Vista/Longhorn.

As usual before the presentation starts, we will first have a quick chat on some recent developments. This month's focus: the Turbo's are there! We will spend some time showing off the free Turbo Explorers and Turbo Merger. The Turbo Explorers have a surprising amount of functionality on board so we are going to quickly walk through the Tool Palette(s) to see what is there.

28 August 2006

Application Frameworks - Taking RAD to the Next Level

Martin Kammann (Autag)

Building business database applications is what most of us do with Delphi. We all know that it involves recurring and boring tasks, many of which could be automated. This presentation will demonstrate how an application framework can radically simplify and speed up these things.

We will build a simple MS Outlook style application that demonstrates how to handle data entry, retrieval, printing etc in a matter of an hour.

The framework to be demonstrated leverages Delphi's Open Tools API by using IDE wizards to generate application modules (Units and forms) and generate a full-scale application with bareley writing any code.

Martin's URL is: www.autag.com

24 July 2006

Interfaces without COM

Alex Fekken (Fekken IT Services)

Another back-to-basics presentation. Traditionally, Interfaces have been associated with COM programming, but especially with the introduction of the .NET framework we see interfaces popping up all over the place. In this presentation we will look at how interfaces are useful in their own right without any reference to COM.

We will work from the usual motivation of Interfaces as a substitute for multiple inheritance. What this means is that classes without a common ancestor can be tied to a "contract" for common functionality (the interface). This then allows objects of these classes to be used interchangeably ("polymorphically") as if they would descend from a common ancestor, at least as far as the functionality specified by the interface is concerned.

As an example we will show how to use a sorting interface to extend pre-existing classes into "sortable classes" that re-use the same sorting algortihm. As the example shows, the strength of Interfaces lies in the fact that pre-existing classes can be extended to implement a given interface "after the-fact", regardless of their inheritance tree.

22 May 2006

Creating Web 2.0 Applications in Delphi6..BDS2006

Ralf Wenske (SPR&M Ltd)

Buzzwords recently seen frequently in the media are Web 2.0 and Ajax. In a technical sense these buzzwords relate to the exchange of data packets between a browser document and the server.

Some Delphians have in the past responded to that buzzword phenomenon in a manner like: 

    'So what - this technology has been around for years - what is all the fuzz about?'

Ralf thinks the 'fuzz' is about the user experience - and that is exciting. However it seems that active web pages are mostly driven by PHP/Python/Java or Microsoft technologies like ASP or ASP.Net. If  XMLHTTP (the underlying protocol) is an "old hat", where then are all these cool  Delphi driven web applications?

Tonight's topic covers some of the areas in which  in Ralf's experience- Delphi is also superior to alternative technologies for developing Web 2.0 applications. All demos will be in Delphi 7 and it will be shown that they are:

• Snappy
• Secure
• Accessible from most browsers (JavaScript)
• Effortless deployment (compile - run - access via Web)
• Simple server setup (no IIS required)

Ralf will demonstrate the entire development cycle for a Web 2.0 application and welcomes any questions or feedback during and after his presentation.

Those attendants who are interested will be given web access to Ralf's test application so everyone can assess the user experience for themselves and can follow the application's progress towards beta and release.

Ralf's web-site: www.sprm.net/qxtest

The goal of Ralf's project is to enable you to apply your Delphi (Win32) developer skills towards development of secure and snappy Web 2.0 applications. 

24 April 2006

Recursion and Trees

Alex Fekken (Fekken IT Services)

In this meeting we will have a "back-to-basics" presentation on recursion and its most important application: implementing tree structures.

We will start with a few basic examples for those unfamiliar or uncomfortable with the idea of recursion. We will then look at the importance of stopping criteria and at why stack overflows are the usual result of badly implemented recursion.

Finally we will go through the process of building a file-system tree and traversing it.

If time permits and people are interested we will have a quick look at Common Table Expressions, the SQL99 way of doing recursive database queries.