Quartex Pascal Build 13b ships
While it can come across as disingenuous, I frickin love this project! As a developer yourself you know that feeling, when you manage to unify various aspects of your program, so that it all fits just perfectly. And the way I implemented file-handling and editors is within that sweet spot.
What is new?
It’s been a couple of weeks since I posted here last, so the list of changes will be quite dramatic. I think its best to focus on the highlights or this post would become very long!
Ironwood license management
Up until 2018 one of my products was a component package called HexLicense. This is a component package for Delphi that provides serial number validation, license handling and (most importantly) serial number minting. The HexLicense components were sold commercially until 2018 when I took them off the market and open-sourced (access was via Patreon. It is now moved to the Quartex Pascal project instead).
Im not going to go into how difficult it is to produce thousands of distinctly different serial numbers based on seed data, but it’s no walk in the park.
The final implementation I made for license minting and validation, was called Ironwood. It took the engine behind HexLicense and took it to a completely new level, incorporating both obfuscation and number modulation.
Needless to say, Ironwood is now a part of the Quartex Pascal RTL. To make it easier to work with the IDE has a nice utility for generating license-numbers, loading and saving keys, exporting license number batches – and much more.
There is also a ready-to-rock node.js application that can generate keys from the command-line (which is good to invoke from a server or service, so that it executes as a separate process).
HTML structure provider
The IDE has a very clean internal architecture, where the actual work is isolated in a set of easy to understand classes. One of these classes is called a TIDEAstProvider class. This is a class whose job it is to parse and otherwise work with whatever content an editor has, and deliver symbolic information that can be displayed in the file-structure treeview.
Obviously we have an object pascal provider, which will quickly compile and generate an AST very quickly in memory. This is used to power both the structure treeview and the code-suggestion.
Next, we have the exact same provider for JavaScript. So when you open a JavaScript file, the file will be processed to produce an AST, and the symbol information will be displayed exactly like your object pascal is. So behavior between these are identical.
We now also have a HTML provider, with a CSS provider on the way. The HTML provider is still in its infancy, but its flexible enough to represent a good foundation to work with. So I will no doubt return to this task later to smarten the provider logic up, and better handle un-valid HTML and CSS.
Code suggestion
Code suggestion is a pretty standard function these days. We have had support for this under Object Pascal for a while now in the IDE (with JavaScript on the way).
Note: the code suggestion-box is un-styled at this point. Custom painting will be added once the core functionality is done.
Code suggestion for HTML is now in place too. It needs a bit of polish since the rules for HTML are wildly different from a programming language, but common behavior like TAG suggestion is there — with attributes, properties and events to follow.
So even if you are not an object pascal developer, the IDE should be nice to work with for traditional JavaScript / HTML code.
Form Recognition
While we cannot activate the form-designer just yet, since we need more AST functionality to extract things like class properties and attributes “live” to be able to do that properly — we are getting really close to that milestone.
The IDE however now recognize form files, so if your unit has an accompanying DFM file, the IDE is smart enough to open up a form-page. Form pages are different from ordinary pascal pages, since they also have the form designer control on a sub-tab. More or less identical to Delphi and Lazarus.
It is going to be so nice to get the form-designer activated. Especially the stack-based layout, which makes scalable, dynamic layout easy to create and work with.
The QTX RTL also supports orientation awareness as a part of the visual component system. One of the first things you will notice when exploring the code, is that ReSize() ships in an Orientation parameter, so you can adjust your layout accordingly.
Help and documentation inside the IDE
The IDE now has a PDF viewer with search functionality built-in. So when you click on Help and Documentation, a tab which shows the documentation PDF opens. This makes it easy to read, learn and find the information you need fast.
Well, that was a brief overview of what has changed since last time!
Next update is, as always, the weekends. We tend to land on sundays for new binaries, but do issue hotfixes in the evenings (weekdays) if something critical shows up.
Come join the fun!
Want to support the project? All financial backers that donates $100+ get their name in the product, access to the full IDE source-code on completion, and access to the Quartex Media Desktop system (which is a complete web desktop with a clustered back-end, compiled to JavaScript and running on node.js. Portable, platform and chipset independent, and very powerful).
A smaller sum monthly is also welcome. The project would not exist without members backing it with $100, $200 etc every month. This both motivates and helps me allocate hours for continuous work.
When the IDE is finished you will also have access to the IDE source-code through special dispensation. Backers have rights since they have helped create the project.
All donations are welcome, both large and small. But donations over $100, especially reoccurring, is what drives this project forward.
Remember to send me a message on Facebook so I can add you to the Admin group: https://www.facebook.com/quartexnor/
Jon L. Aasenden 
👋, Jon! I donated a few days back, but was wondering how can I get access to the builds? Thank you!
Have you contacted me pn FB??
There are some timeline to launch Quartex Pascal?