Node and delphi in sweet harmony

There are cases when you want to dip your toe into Delphi land. While I can’t think of anything in particular at the moment – it would be handy if you say, have some Delphi dll’s that you would like to re-use, so you don’t have to re-write the whole thing in Smart Pascal.

Enter FFI

There is this mind-blowing package over at NPM and if you don’t know it yet, you are going to love it. Its called FFI (foreign function interface) and essentially allows you to call functions from ordinary libraries (DLL, .SO and .DynLib’s). It is supported on both Windows, OS X and Linux. So yeah, now you can call Delphi from your Smart code!

Check out FFI and be blown away at all the cool stuff you can do!

So let’s say you have this awesome data backend written in Delphi and you don’t want to re-write 10 years of code. What you can do is simply create a DLL and expose a simplified API for the core functionality — and then call those from your Smart Pascal node.js server — which is just mind-bending awesome (excuse my language)!

You can also call functions exposed in the same process. So lets say you are calling node.js from your Delphi applications (or C++, or Freepascal or C# – whatever floats your boat) then you guessed it – you can now invoke methods from the “runner”.

There goes another weekend

I was going to relax this weekend but im busy compiling node.js from scratch (and you know how I feel about C++ from Linux, its like the worst date ever!) to something visual studio can eat – and then export it from that into Delphi. For some reason C++ builder goes off bonkers when I try to build it there. Which is so odd because it should be vanilla C/C++ (probably some gnu curiosity messing it up)

 

Create awesome full browser-desktop apps in Smart!

 

But once .DCU i-fied, how does a TNodeJS component sound? Already have TV8Engine – so yeah, interfacing with the mothership (read: Delphi) is important to us.

Anyways – if your brain didn’t just blow with the FFI info, then go and get all girly inside right now – because this bridges the gap so utterly between native and scalable, kick ass clustered JavaScript server-side!

https://www.npmjs.com/package/ffi

If you still wonder if this is powerful enough, check out the Smart based operating system that is currently kicking serious butt! It even runs 68k assembly programs (real Amiga applications) in a window! This is the core demo for the SMS update (it should have been out 2 weeks ago, I know – but its not me in charge of that bit!).

An OS in smart? Sure, with a linux bootstrap ofcourse – but man does it run!

Oh and by the way, Smart Pascal now gives you access to more than 350.000 node.js packages. That is the biggest, bad-ass code-repo in existence. And you can then add typescript as well.

Ok let’s do this!