Hydra, what’s the big deal anyway?

RemObjects Hydra is a product I have used for years in concert with Delphi, and like most developers that come into contact with RemObjects products – once the full scope of the components hit you, you never want to go back to not using Hydra in your applications.

Note: It’s easy to dismiss Hydra as a “Delphi product”, but Hydra for .Net and Java does the exact same thing, namely let you mix and match modules from different languages in your programs. So if you are a C# developer looking for ways to incorporate Java, Delphi, Elements or Freepascal components in your application, then keep reading.

But let’s start with what Hydra can do for Delphi developers.

What is Hydra anyways?

Hydra is a component package for Delphi, Freepascal, .Net and Java that takes plugins to a whole new level. Now bear with me for a second, because these plugins is in a completely different league from anything you have used in the past.

In short, Hydra allows you to wrap code and components from other languages, and use them from Delphi or Lazarus. There are thousands of really amazing components for the .Net and Java platforms, and Hydra allows you compile those into modules (or “plugins” if you prefer that); modules that can then be used in your applications like they were native components.

Hydra, here using a C# component in a Delphi application

But it doesn’t stop there; you can also mix VCL and FMX modules in the same application. This is extremely powerful since it offers a clear path to modernizing your codebase gradually rather than doing a time consuming and costly re-write.

So if you want to move your aging VCL codebase to Firemonkey, but the cost of having to re-write all your forms and business logic for FMX would break your budget -that’s where Hydra gives you a second option: namely that you can continue to use your VCL code from FMX and refactor the application in your own tempo and with minimal financial impact.

The best of all worlds

Not long ago RemObjects added support for Lazarus (Freepascal) to the mix, which once again opens a whole new ecosystem that Delphi, C# and Java developers can benefit from. Delphi has a lot of really cool components, but Lazarus have components that are not always available for Delphi. There are some really good developers in the Freepascal community, and you will find hundreds of components and classes (if not thousands) that are open-source; For example, Lazarus has a branch of Synedit that is much more evolved and polished than the fork available for Delphi. And with Hydra you can compile that into a module / plugin and use it in your Delphi applications.

Check out a video on Hydra by Jim McKeeth

This is also true for Java and C# developers. Some of the components available for native languages might not have similar functionality in the .Net world, and by using Hydra you can tap into the wealth that native languages have to offer.

As a Delphi or Freepascal developer, perhaps you have seen some of the fancy grids C# and Java coders enjoy? Developer Express have some of the coolest components available for any platform, but their focus is more on .Net these days than Delphi. They do maintain the control packages they have, but compared to the amount of development done for C# their Delphi offerings are abysmal. So with Hydra you can tap into the .Net side of things and use the latest components and libraries in your Delphi applications.

Financial savings

One of coolest features of Hydra, is that you can use it across Delphi versions. This has helped me leverage the price-tag of updating to the latest Delphi.

It’s easy to forget that whenever you update Delphi, you also need to update the components you have bought. This was one of the reasons I was reluctant to upgrade my Delphi license until Embarcadero released Delphi 10.2. Because I had thousands of dollars invested in components – and updating all my licenses would cost a small fortune.

So to get around this, I put the components into a Hydra module and compiled that using my older Delphi. And then i simply used those modules from my new Delphi installation. This way I was able to cut cost by thousands of dollars and enjoy the latest Delphi.

Using Firemonkey controls under VCL is easy with Hydra

A couple of years back I also took the time to wrap a ton of older components that work fine but are no longer maintained or sold. I used an older version of Delphi to get these components into a Hydra module – and I can now use those with Delphi 10.3 (!). In my case there was a component-set for working closely with Active Directory that I have used in a customer’s project (and much faster than having to go the route via SQL). The company that made these don’t exist any more, and I have no source-code for the components.

The only way I could have used these without Hydra, would be to compile them into a .dll file and painstakingly export every single method (or use COM+ to cross the 32-bit / 64-bit barrier), which would have taken me a week since we are talking a large body of quality code. With Hydra i was able to wrap the whole thing in less than an hour.

I’m not advocating that people stop updating their components. But I am very thankful for the opportunity to delay having to update my entire component stack just to enjoy a modern version of Delphi.

Hydra gives me that opportunity, which means I can upgrade when my wallet allows it.

Building better applications

There is also another side to Hydra, namely that it allows you to design applications in a modular way. If you have the luxury of starting a brand new project and use Hydra from day one, you can isolate each part of your application as a module. Avoiding the trap of monolithic applications.

Hydra for .Net allows you to use Delphi, Java and FPC modules under C#

This way of working has great impact on how you maintain your software, and consequently how you issue hotfixes and updates. If you have isolated each key part of your application as separate modules, you don’t need to ship a full build every time.

This also safeguards you from having all your eggs in one basket. If you have isolated each form (for example) as separate modules, there is nothing stopping you from rewriting some of these forms in another language – or cross the VCL and FMX barrier. You have to admit that being able to use the latest components from Developer Express is pretty cool. There is not a shadow of a doubt that Developer-Express makes the best damn components around for any platform. There are many grids for Delphi, but they cant hold a candle to the latest and greatest from Developer Express.

Why can’t I just use packages?

If you are thinking “hey, this sounds exactly like packages, why should I buy Hydra when packages does the exact same thing?“. Actually that’s not how packages work for Delphi.

Delphi packages are cool, but they are also severely limited. One of the reasons you have to update your components whenever you buy a newer version of Delphi, is because packages are not backwards compatible.

Delphi packages are great, but severely limited

A Delphi package must be compiled with the same RTL as the host (your program), and version information and RTTI must match. This is because packages use the same RTL and more importantly, the same memory manager.

Hydra modules are not packages. They are clean and lean library files (*.dll files) that includes whatever RTL you compiled them with. In other words, you can safely load a Hydra module compiled with Delphi 7, into a Delphi 10.3 application without having to re-compile.

Once you start to work with Hydra, you gradually build up modules of functionality that you can recycle in the future. In many ways Hydra is a whole new take on components and RAD. This is how Delphi packages and libraries should have been.

Without saying anything bad about Delphi, because Delphi is a system that I love very much; but having to update your entire component stack just to use the latest Delphi, is sadly one of the factors that have led developers to abandon the platform. If you have USD 10.000 in dependencies, having to pay that as well as buying Delphi can be difficult to justify; especially when comparing with other languages and ecosystems.

For me, Hydra has been a tremendous boon for Delphi. It has allowed me to keep current with Delphi and all it’s many new features, without losing the money I have already invested in components packages.

If you are looking for something to bring your product to the next level, then I urge you to spend a few hours with Hydra. The documentation is exceptional, the features and benefits are outstanding — and you will wonder how you ever managed to work without them.

External resources

Disclaimer: I am not a salesman by any stretch of the imagination. I realize that promoting a product made by the company you work for might come across as a sales pitch; but that’s just it: I started to work for RemObjects for a reason. And that reason is that I have used their products since they came on the market. I have worked with these components long before I started working at RemObjects.

• Hydra website
• Hydra documentation
• Article: Mixing .Net and Java

ARM Linux Services with Oxygene and Elements

Linux is one of those systems that just appeals to me out of the box. I work with Windows on a daily basis, but at this point there is really nothing in the way of me jumping ship all together. I mean, whenever i need something that is Windows specific, I can just fire up a virtual-machine and get the job done there.

The only thing that is stopping me from going “all in” with Linux (and believe me I have tried) is that finding proper documentation for Linux written with Windows converts in mind, is actually a challenge in itself. Most tutorials are either meant for non-developers, like how to install a program via Synaptic and so on; which is brilliant if you have no experience with Linux whatsoever. But finding articles that aims to help a Windows developer get up to speed on Linux, that’s the tricky bit.

Top-Left bash window shows the output of my Elements compiled micro-service

One of the features I wanted to learn about, was how to run a program as a service on Linux. Under Windows this is quite easy. You have the service manager that gives you a good overview of registered services. And programatically a service is ultimately just a normal WinAPI program that supports the service-api messages. Writing services in either Object-Pascal or C# is pretty straight-forward. I also do a lot of service work via Quartex Pascal (my own toolchain) that compiles to JavaScript. Node.js is actually a very capable service host once you understand the infrastructure.

Writing Daemons with Oxygene and Elements

Since the Elements compiler generates code for ARM Linux, learning how to get a service registered and started on boot is something that I think many developers will be interested in. It was one of the first questions I had when I started looking at Linux, and it took a while to find a clean cut answer.

In this little article I will show you how I went about this, but please keep in mind that Linux never has “one way” of doing something. Part of the strength that Linux delivers, is that you can configure and customize the system completely, from Kernel to desktop. You literally have different service sub-systems to pick from, as well as different windowing-managers, desktop systems (e.g Wayland or X) and even keyring implementations. This is what makes Linux so confusing when coming from a mono culture like Microsoft Windows.

As for hardware, i’m using an ODroid N2, which is a very powerful ARM based SBC (single board computer). You can use more or less any ARM device with Elements, providing the Linux distribution is based on Debian. So a Raspberry PI v4 with Ubuntu or Lubuntu will work fine. I’m using the ODroid N2 “full disk image” with Ubuntu Mate. So nothing out of the ordinary.

To make something clear off the bat: a Linux service (called a daemon, the ancient greek word for “helper” and “informer”) is just an ordinary shell application. You don’t have to do anything in particular in terms of code. Once your service is registered, you can start and stop it with the systemctl shell command like any other Linux service.

Note: There is also fork() mechanisms (cloning processes), but that’s out of scope for this little post.

Service manifest

Before we can get your binary registered as a service, we need to write a service manifest file. This is just a normal text-file in INI format that defines how you want your service to run. Here is an example of such a file:

[Unit]
Description=Elements Service
After=network.target
StartLimitIntervalSec=0

[Service]
Type=simple
Restart=always
RestartSec=1
User=qtx
ExecStart=/usr/bin /usr/bin/ElementsService.exe

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Before you save this file, remember to replace the username (user=) and the name of your executable.

Note: The ExecStart property can be defined in 3 ways:

• Direct path to the executable
• Current working directory + path to executable (like above)
• Current working directory + path to executable + parameters

You can read more about each property here: System.d service info

Systemd

For debian based distributions (Ubuntu branches) the most common service-host (or process manager) is called systemd. I am not even going to pretend to know the differences between systemd and the older Init. There are fierce debates in the Linux community around these two alternatives. But unless you are a Linux C developer that likes to roll your own Kernel in the weekends, it’s not really relevant for our goals in this post. Our task here is to write useful services and make them run side-by-side with other services.

With the service-manifest file done, we need to copy the service manifest in place where systemd can find it. So start by saving the manifest file as “elements.service” here:

/etc/systemd/system/elements.service

As you probably guessed from the ExecPath property, your service executable goes in:

/usr/bin/ElementsService.exe

If all went well you can now start your service from the command-line:

systemctl start elements

And you can stop the service with:

systemctl stop elements

Resident services

Starting and stopping a service is all good and well, but that doesn’t mean it will automatically start when you reboot your Linux box. In order to make the service resident (persisted, so Linux remembers to fire it up on boot), you have to enable the service:

systemctl enable elements

If you want to stop the service from starting on boot, just disable it:

systemctl disable elements

Now there is a ton of things you can tweak and change in the service-manifest file. For example, do you want Linux to restart your service if it crashes? How many times should Linux attempt to bring the service back up? Should it only bring it back up if the exit-code is zero?

If you want Linux to always restart a service if it stops (regardless of reason), you set the following flag in the service-manifest:

Restart=always

If you want Linux to only restart if the service fails, meaning that the exit-code of the application is <> 0, then you use this value instead:

Restart=on-failure

You can also set the service to only start after some other service, for example if your service has networking as a criteria (which is what we set in the service-manifest above), or a database engine.

There is a ton of different settings you can apply to the service-manifest, but listing them all here would be a small book. Better to just check the documentation and experiment a bit. So check the link and pick the ones that makes sense to your particular service.

Reflections

You should be very careful with how you define restart options. If something goes wrong and your service crash on start, Linux will keep restarting it en-mass. Automatic restart creates a loop, and it can be wise to make sure it doesn’t get stuck. I would set restart to “on-error” exclusively, so that your service has a chance to exit gracefully.

Happy coding! And a special thanks to Benjamin Morel for his helpful posts.

 

 

.NetRocks, you made my day!

A popular website for .Net developers is called dot-net-rocks. This is an interesting site that has been going for a while now; well worth the visit if you do work with the .Net framework via RemObjects Elements, VS or Mono.

Now it turns out that the guys over at dot–net-rocks just did an episode on their podcast where they open by labeling me as a “raving lunatic” (I clearly have my moments); which I find absolutely hilarious, but not for the same reasons as them.

Long story short: They are doing a podcast on how to migrate legacy Delphi applications to C#, and in that context they somehow tracked down an article I posted way back in 2016, which was meant as a satire piece. Now don’t get me wrong, there are serious points in the article, like how the .Net framework was modeled on the Delphi VCL, and how the concepts around CLR and JIT were researched at Borland; but the tone of the whole thing, the “larger than life” claims etc. was meant to demonstrate just how some .Net developers behave when faced with alternative eco-systems. Having managed some 16+ usergroups for Delphi, C#, JavaScript (a total of six languages) on Facebook for close to 15 years, as well as working for Embarcadero that makes Delphi -I speak from experience.

It might be news to these guys that large companies around Europe is still using Delphi, modern Delphi, and that Object Pascal as a language scores well on the Tiobi index of popular programming languages. And no amount of echo-chamber mentality is going to change that fact. Heck, as late as 2018 and The Walt Disney Company wanted to replace C# with Delphi, because it turns out that bytecodes and embedded tech is not the best combination (cpu spikes when the GC kicks in, no real-time interrupt handling possible, GPIO delays, the list goes on).

I mean, the post i made back in 2016 is such obvious, low-hanging fruit for a show their size to pound on. You have this massive show that takes on a single, albeit ranting (and probably a bit of a lunatic if I don’t get my coffee) coder’s post. Underlying in the process how little they know about the object pascal community at large. They just demonstrated my point in bold, italic and underline 😀

Look before you shoot

DotNetRocks is either oblivious that Delphi still have millions of users around the world, or that Pascal is in fact available for .Net (which is a bit worrying since .Net is supposed to be their game). The alternative is that the facts I listed hit a little too close to home. I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide. Microsoft has lost at least 10 Universities around Europe to Delphi in 2018 that I know of, two of them Norwegian where I was personally involved in the license sales. While only speculation, I do find the timing for their podcast and focus on me in particular to be, “curious”.

And for the record, the most obvious solution when faced with “that legacy Delphi project”, is to just go and buy a modern version of Delphi. DotNetRocks delivered a perfect example of that very arrogance my 2016 post was designed to convey; namely that “brogrammers” often act like Delphi 7 was the last Delphi. They also resorted to lies to sell their points: I never said that Anders was dogged for creating Delphi. Quite the opposite. I simply underlined that by ridiculing Delphi in one hand, and praising it’s author with the other – you are indirectly (and paradoxically) invalidating half his career. Anders is an awesome developer, but why exclude how he evolved his skills? Ofcourse Ander’s products will have his architectural signature on them.

Not once did they mention Embarcadero or the fact that Delphi has been aggressively developed since Borland kicked the bucket. Probably hoping that undermining the messenger will somehow invalidate the message.

Porting Delphi to C# manually? Ok.. why not install Elements and just compile it into an assembly? You don’t even have to leave Visual Studio

Also, such an odd podcast for professional developers to run with. I mean, who the hell converts a Delphi project to C# manually? It’s like listening to a graphics artist that dont know that Photoshop and Illustrator are the de-facto tools to use. How is that even possible? A website dedicated to .Net, yet with no insight into the languages that run on the CLR? Wow.

If you want to port something from Delphi to .Net, you don’t sit down and manually convert stuff. You use proper tools like Elements from RemObjects; This gives you Object-Pascal for .Net (so a lot of code will compile just fine with only minor changes). Elements also ships with source-conversion tools, so once you have it running under Oxygene Pascal (the dialect is called Oxygene) you either just use the assemblies — or convert the Pascal code to C# through a tool called an Oxidizer.

The most obvious solution is to just upgrade to a Delphi version from this century

The other solution is to use Hydra, also a RemObjects product. They can then compile the Delphi code into a library (including visual parts like forms and frames), and simply use that as any other assembly from within C#. This allows you to gradually phase out older parts without breaking the product. You can also use C# assemblies from Delphi with Hydra.

So by all means, call me what you like. You have only proved my point so far. You clearly have zero insight into the predominant Object-Pascal eco-systems, you clearly don’t know the tools developers use to interop between arcetypical and contextual languages — and instead of fact checking some of the points I made, dry humor notwithstanding, you just reacted like brogrammers do.

Well, It’s been weeks since I laughed this hard 😀 You really need to check before you pick someone to verbally abuse on the first date, because you might just bite yourself in the arse here he he

Cheers