Perth Delphi Meeting – 19 April 2016

Where Artifactory  8/16 Guthrie St, Osborne Park WA 6017
When Tuesday 19th March.  6pm start

Agenda (not necessarily in this order)

* Scott van der Linden – Fast Calc Engine
Fast Calc* – a formula calculation engine, and using attributes for in-application documentation.

The newly RTTI capabilities introduced in Delphi 2010 also allowed a new paradigm of coding in Delphi: Aspect Oriented Programming.  By taking this approach I was able to separate functional behaviour from documentation behaviour – a good coding practise. I will also go through the principles involved in building a language parsing engine, some of the “gotchas” that I found along the way, and how it has evolved over time.

* The Fast Calc engine I developed replaced COM access to the Excel Execute method that was far too slow – this calculation engine offers multiple orders of magnitude speed improvement.  It is used in SeleXpress – an engineering equipment sizing application developed exclusively for WorleyParsons, and a unit conversion tool that is about to be released as a free download by Advisian (a WorleyParsons company).

* Peter Wright’s Embarcadero Jiras.  Q&A on the items he has raised on the new Embarcadero JIRA system

* Peter Thönell – PtEvents and PtSettings from FOSS library
PtEvents is an implementation of the “Observer” pattern.  That means that an object can make callbacks to multiple “observers”/listeners.
With component events in Delphi (ex. OnButtonClick(), OnMouseDown(), etc.) you can specify only one observer (ex. TMainForm.Button1Click() ).
With PtEvents you have a collection of callbacks methods, so that when an event fires it can call all of them
There have been a few gotchas in making this stable.

Marcos pizza courtesy of Embarcadero