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Quartex: Mali GPU glitches
Something really strange is happening on Chrome and Firefox for ARM. Javascript is not supposed to be able to take down a system, and in this case its neither an attempt as such either — yet for some reason I have managed to take down the ODroid XU4 with both Chrome and Firefox lately.
ODroid XU4
I guess I should lead with that I’m not able to replicate this on x86. One of the things I really love about the ODroid XU4 is that it’s affordable, powerful and probably the only SBC I have used that runs stable on the mali GPU. As you probably know I tested at least 10 different SBC’s back in 2018, and whenever there was a mali GPU involved, the product was either haunted by instabilities or lacked drivers all together.
Since the codebase for Chrome (and I presume Firefox) is ultimately the same between platforms, it leaves a question-mark about the ODroid. It is by far the most stable SBC I have tested so far (except for the PI, which is sadly underpowered for this task), but stable doesn’t mean flawless. And to be honest, Amibian.js is pushing web tech to the very limits.
Not Mali again
The reason I suspect the mali to be the culprit behind all this, is because the “bug” if we can call it that, happens exclusively during resize. So if there is a lot going on inside a desktop-window, you can sometimes provoke the ODroid to cold-crash and reboot. You actually have to power the board down and switch it back on for it to boot properly.
Cloudripper ~ 5x ODroid XU4 [40 cores] in a PICO 5h cube
The challenge is that there is no way to debug or catch this error, because when it occurs the whole system literally goes down. There is no exception thrown, nor is the browser process terminated (not even a log entry, so its a clean cut) — the system reboots on the spot. Since it fails on reboot when opening X (setting a screen-mode) I again point the finger at the GPU. Somehow a flag or lock survives the cold-reboot and that’s why you have to manually switch it off and on again.
This is the exact problem that made the NanoPI Fire useless. It only shipped with Android embedded drivers. The X drivers could hardly open a display without crashing. Such a waste of a good cpu.
x86 as head
ODroid is perfect for a low-cost Amibian.js experience, but I was unsure if it would handle the payload. Interestingly it handles it just fine and even with a high-speed action game running + background tasks we are not using 50% of the CPU even.
Ram is holding up too, with memory consumption while running Tyrian + having a few graphics viewers open, is at a reasonable 700 mb (of 2 gigabyte in total).
Tyrian jogs along at 45 fps ~ that is not bad for a $45 SBC
Right now this strange error is rare, but if it continues or grows into a problem (chrome is hardly useable at all, only firefox) then I have no option than to replace the master sbc in the cluster with something else. The x86 UP board is more than capable, but it would be a shame to break the price range because of that (excuse my language) crap mali GPU. I honestly dont understand why board makers insist on using a mali. Every board that has a mali is haunted by problems and get poor reviews.
It will be exciting to check out the dragonboard, although I fear 1Gb memory will not be enough for smooth operation. Not without a sata interface and a good swap-file.
Android and Delphi
One alternative is to switch to Android and use Delphi to code a custom Chromium Embedded webview. I am hoping to avoid the overhead of Android, but Delphi would definitively be a bonus with Android embedded (“Android of things”).
We will see.
Five reasons to learn Delphi
A couple of days ago I had a spectacular debate on Facebook. Like most individuals that are active in the IT community, my social media feed is loaded with advertisement for every trending IT concept you can imagine. Lately these adverts have been about machine learning and A.I. Or should I say, companies using those buzzwords to draw unwarranted attention to their products. I haven’t seen A.I used to sell shoes yet, but it’s only a matter of time before it happens.
Like any technology, Cloud is only as powerful as your insight
There is also this thing that: yes, a 14-year-old can put together an A.I chat robot in 15 minutes with product XYZ. But that doesn’t mean he or she understands what is happening beneath the user-interface. Surely the goal must be to teach those kids skills that will benefit them for a lifetime.
Those that know me also know that yes, I have this tendency to say what I mean, even when I really should keep my mouth shut. On the other hand that is also why companies and developers call me, because I will call bullshit and help them avoid it. That’s part of my job, to help individuals and companies that use Delphi to pick the right version for their need, get the components that’s right for their goals – and map out a strategy if they need some input on that. I’ll even dive in and do some code conversion if they need it; goes with the territory.
Normally I just ignore advertizing that put “cloud” or “a.i” in their title, because it’s mostly click-bait designed for non-developers. But for some reason this one particular advert caught my eye. Perhaps it triggered the trauma of being subjected to early Java advertising during the late 90s’s, or maybe it released latent aggression from being psychologically waterboarded by Microsoft Silverlight. Who knows 🙂
The ad was about a Norwegian company that specialize in teaching young students how to become professional developers. You know the “become a guru in 3 weeks” type publisher? What baked my noodle was the fact that they didn’t offer a single course involving archetypical languages, and that they were spinning their material with promises that were simply not true. The only artificial intelligence involved was the advertizing engine at Facebook.
The thing is – the world has more than enough developers on desktop level. The desktop and web market is drowning in developers who has the capacity to download libraries, drop components on a form and hook up to a database. What the world really needs are more developers on archetypical languages. And if you don’t know what that is, then let me just do a quick summary before we carry on.
Archetypal languages
An archetypical programming language is one that is designed around how the computer actually works. As a consequence these languages and toolchains embody several of the following properties:
- Pointers and raw memory access
- Traditional memory management, no garbage collection
- Procedural and object-orientation execution
- Inline assembler
- Little if no external dependencies
- Static linking (embed pre-compiled code)
- Compiled code can operate without an OS infrastructure
- Suitable for kernel, driver, service, desktop, networking and cloud level development
- Compiler that produce machine code for various chipsets
As of writing there are only two archetypical languages (actually 3, but assembly language is chipset specific so we will skip that here), namely C/C++ and Object Pascal. These are the languages you use to write all the other languages with. If you plan on writing your own operating-system from scratch, only C and Pascal is suitable. Which is why these are the only languages that have ever been used for making operating systems.
Delphi is one of the 20 most used programming languages in the world. It ranked as #11 in 2017. Like all rankings it fluctuates depending on season and market changes.
Obviously i’m not suggesting that people learn Delphi or C++ builder to write their own OS – or that you must know assembly to make an invoice system; I’m simply stating that the insight and skill you get from learning Delphi and C/C++, even if all you do is write desktop applications – will make you a better developer on all levels.
Optimistic languages
Optimistic or humanized programming languages, have been around just as long as the archetypical ones. Basic is an optimistic language, C# and Java are optimistic languages, Go and Dart are equally optimistic languages. Script engines like node.js, python and Erlang (if you missed Scott Hanselman’s epic rant on the subject, you are in for a treat) are all optimistic. They are called optimistic because they trade security with functionality; sandboxing the developer from the harsh reality of hardware.
An optimistic language is typically designed to function according to “how human beings would like things to be” (hence the term optimistic). These languages rely heavily on existing infrastructure to even work, and each language tends to focus on specific tasks – only to branch out and become more general purpose over time.
There is nothing wrong with optimistic languages. Except when they are marketed to young students as being somehow superior or en-par with archetypical languages. That is a very dangerous thing to do – because teachers have a responsibility to prepare the students for real life. I can’t even count the number of times I have seen young developers fresh out of college get “that job”, only to realize that the heart of the business, the mission critical stuff, is written in Delphi or C/C++, which they never learned.
People have no idea just how much of the modern world rests on these languages. It is almost alarming how it’s possible to be a developer in 2019 and have a blind spot with regards to these distinctions. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not the student’s fault, quite the opposite. And i’m happy that things are starting to change for the better (more about that further down).
The original full stack
So back to my little encounter; What happened was that I just commented something along the lines of “why not give the kids something that will benefit them for a lifetime”. It was just a drive-by comment on my part, and I should have just ignored it; And no sooner had I pressed enter, when a small army of internet warriors appeared to defend their interpretation of “full stack” in 2019. Oblivious to the fact that the exact same term was used around 1988-ish. I think it was Aztec or SAS-C that coined it. Doesn’t matter.
The original “full stack” holds a very different meaning in traditional development. While I don’t remember if it was Aztec-C or SAS-C, but the full stack was driver to desktop 🙂
Long story short, I ended up having a conversation with these teenagers about how technology has evolved over the past 35 years. Not in theory, but as one that has been a programmer since the C= 64 was released. I also introduced them to archetypal languages and pinpointed the distinction I made above. You cannot compare if you don’t know the difference.
I have no problems with other languages, I use several myself, and my point was simply that: if we are going to teach the next generation of programmers something, then let’s teach them the timeless principles and tools that our eco system rests on. We need to get Delphi and C/C++ back into the curriculum, because that in turn will help the students to become better developers. It doesn’t matter what they end up working with afterwards, because with the fundamental understanding in place they will be better suited. Period.
You will be a better Java developer if you first learn Delphi. You will be a better C# developer if you learn Delphi. Just like nature has layers of complexity, so does computing. And understanding how each layer works and what laws exist there – will have a huge impact on how you write high-level code.
All of this was good and well and the internet warriors seemed a bit confused. They weren’t prepared for an actual conversation. So what started a bit rough ended up as a meaningful, nice dialog.
And speaking of education: I’m happy to say that two universities in Norway now have students using Delphi again. Which is a step in the right direction! People are re-discovering how productive Object-Pascal is, and why the language remains the bread and butter of so many companies around the world.
Piracy, the hydra of problems
What affected me the most during my conversation with these young developers – was that they had almost no relationship to neither Delphi or C/C++. From an educational standpoint that is not just alarming, that is an intellectual emergency. The only knowledge they had of Delphi was hearsay and nonsense.
The source of the misrepresentation is piracy, openly so, of outdated versions that was never designed to run on modern operating systems. With the community edition people can enjoy a modern, high performance Delphi without resorting to illegal activities
But after a while I finally discovered where their information came from! Delphi 7 is being pirated en-mass even to this day. It’s for some strange reason very popular in Asia (most of the torrent IP’s ended up there when I followed up on this). So teenagers download Delphi 7 which is ancient by any standard, and the first thing they experience is incompatibility issues. Which is only to be expected because Delphi 7 was released a long, long time ago. But that’s the impression they are left with after downloading one of these cracked, illegal bundles.
I downloaded one of these “ready to use” bundles to have a closer look, and it contained at least 500 commercial components. You had the full TMS component collection, Developer Express, Remobjects SDK, ImageEN, FastReports, SecureBlackBox, Intraweb — tens of thousands of dollars worth of code. With one very obvious factor: both Delphi 7 and the components involved are severely outdated. Microsoft doesn’t even support Windows XP any more, it was written in the early bronze age.
So the reality of the situation was that these young developers had never seen a modern Delphi in their life. In their minds, Delphi meant Delphi 7 which they could download almost everywhere (which is illegal and riddled with viruses, stay well clear). No wonder there is confusion about the subject (!)
They were very happy to learn about the community edition, so in the end I at least got to wake them up to the awesome features that modern Delphi represents. The community edition has been a fantastic thing; the number of members joining Delphi-Developer on Facebook has nearly doubled since the community edition was released.
A few of the students went over to Embarcadero and downloaded the community edition, and their jaw dropped. They had never seen a development environment like this before!
Give me five good reasons to learn Delphi
In light of this episode, thought I could share five reasons why Delphi and object-pascal remains my primary programming language.
I don’t have any problems dipping into JavaScript, Python or whatever the situation might call for – but when it comes to mission critical data processing and services that needs 24/7 up-time; or embedded solutions where CPU spikes simply cannot be tolerated. It’s Delphi I turn to.
These five reasons are also the same that I gave the teenagers. So here goes.
Great depth and wingspan
Object Pascal, from which Delphi is the trending dialect, is a fantastic language. At heart there is little difference between C/C++ and object pascal in terms of features, but the syntax of object pascal is more productive than C/C++ (IMHO).
Delphi and C++ builder actually share run-time libraries (there are two of them, the VCL which is Windows only, and Firemonkey which is platform independent). Developers often mix and match code between these languages, so components written in Delphi can be used in C++ builder, and libraries written in C can be consumed and linked into your Delphi executable.
One interesting factoid: people imagine Delphi to be old. But the C language is actually 3 years older than pascal. During their time these languages have evolved side by side, and Embarcadero (who makes Delphi and C++ builder) have brought all the interesting features you expect from a modern language into Delphi (things like generics, inline variables, anonymous procedures – it’s all in there). So this myth that Delphi is somehow outdated or unsuitable is just that – a myth.
The eco-system of programming languages
And there is an added bonus! Just like C/C++, Delphi represents a curriculum and lineage that spans decades. Stop and think about that for a second. This is a language that has been evolved to solve technical challenges of every conceivable type for decades. This means that you can put some faith in what the language can deliver.
There are millions of Delphi developers in the world; an estimated 10 millions in fact. The language was ranked #11 on the TIOBI language index; it is under constant development with a clear roadmap and time-line – and is used by large and small companies as the foundation for their business. Even the Norwegian government rely on Delphi. The system that handles healthcare messages for the Norwegian population is pure Delphi. That is data processing for 5.2 million individuals.
Object Pascal has not just stood the test of time, it has innovated it. Just like C/C++ object pascal has a wingspan and depth that reaches from assembler to system services, from database engines to visual desktop application – and from the desktop all the way to Cloud and essential web technology.
So the first good reason to learn Delphi is depth. Delphi covers the native stack, from kernel level drivers to high-speed database engines – to visual desktop applications. It’s also exceptionally well suited for cloud services (both Windows and Linux targets).
Easy to learn
I mention that Delphi is powerful and has the same depth as C/C++, but why then learn Delphi and not C++? Well, the language (object pascal) was especially tailored for readability. It was concluded that the human brain recognized words faster than symbols or glyphs – and thus it’s easier to read complex pascal code rather than complex C code. Individual taste notwithstanding.
Despite its depth, Delphi is easy to learn and fun to master!
Object Pascal is also very declarative, with as little unknown factors as possible. This teaches people to write clean and orderly code.
And perhaps my favorite, a pascal code-file contains both interface and implementation. So you don’t have to write a second .h file which is common under C/C++.
If you already know OOP, be it Java, C#, Rust or whatever – learning Delphi will be a piece of cake. You already know about classes, interfaces, generics, operator overloading – and can pretty much skip forward to memory management, pointers and structures (records in pascal, struct in C).
Swing by Embarcadero Academy and take a course, or head over to Amazon and buy some good books on Delphi. Download the Community Edition of Delphi and you will be up and running in no-time.
Also remember to join Delphi Developer on Facebook, where thousands of active developers talk, help each other and share solutions 24/7.
Target multiple platforms
With Delphi and C++ builder it’s pretty easy to target multiple platforms these days. You can target Android, iOS, OS X, Windows and Linux from a single codebase.
One codebase, multiple targets
I mean, are you going to write one version of your app in Java, a second one in C#, a third one in Objective C and a fourth in Dart? Because that’s the reality you face if plan on using the development tools provided by each operating-system manufacturer. That’s a lot of time, money and effort just to push your product out the door.
With Delphi you can hit all platforms at once, native code, reducing your time to market and ROI. People use Delphi for a reason.
You will also enjoy great performance from the LLVM optimized code Delphi emits on mobile platforms.
Rich codebase
The benefit of age is often said to be wisdom; I guess the computing equivalent is a large and rich collection of components, libraries and ad-hoc code that you can drop into your own projects or just study.
You can google just about any subject, and there will be code for Delphi. Github, BitBucket and Torry’s Delphi pages are packed with open-source frameworks covering everything from compiler cores, midi interfaces, game development to multi-threaded, machine clustered server solutions. Once you start looking, you will find it.
There is a rich constellation of code, components and libraries for Delphi and C++ builder around the internet. Also remember dedicated sites like Torry’s
There is also a long list of technology partners that produce components and libraries for Delphi – and like mentioned earlier, you can link in C compiled code once you learn the ropes.
Oh, and when I mentioned databases earlier I wasnt just talking about the traditional databases. Delphi got you covered with those, no worries — im also talking about writing a database engine from scratch. There are several database engines that are implemented purely in Delphi. ElevateDB is one example.
Delphi also ships with Interbase and Interbase-light (embedded and mobile) so you have easy access to data storage solutions. There is also FireFAC that allows you to connect directly with established databases — and again, a wealth of free and commercial solutions.
Speed and technique
What I love about Delphi and C++ is that your code, or the way you write code, directly impacts your results. The art of optimization is rarely a factor in some of the new, optimistic languages. But in a native language you get to use traditional techniques that are time-less, or perhaps more interesting: explore ways of achieving the same with less.
As a native language Delphi and C/C++ produce fast executables. But I love how there is always room for your own techniques, your own components and your own libraries.
Techniques, like math, is timeless
Need to write a system driver? Well, suddenly speed becomes a very important factor. A garbage collector can be a disaster on that level, because it will kick-in on interval and cause CPU spikes. Perhaps you want to write a compiler, or need a solid scripting engine? How about linking the V8 JavaScript engine directly into your programs? All of this is quite simple with Delphi.
So with Delphi I get the best of both worlds, I get to use the scalpel when the needs are delicate, and I get the chain-saw to cut through tedious work. Things like property bindings are a god sent. This is a techniques where you can visually bind properties of any component together, almost like events, and create cause and effect chains. So if a value changes on a bound property, that triggers whatever is bound, and so on and so on — pretty awesome!
So you can create a complete database application, with grid and navigation, without writing a single line of code. That was just one simple example, you can do so much more out of the box – and it saves you so much time.
Yet when you really need to write high performance code, or build that killer framework that will set your company apart from the rest — you have that freedom!
So if you havent checked out RAD Studio, head over to Embarcadero and download a free trial. You will be amazed and realize just why Delphi and C++ builder are loved by so many.
Linux: political correctness vs Gnu-Linux hacker spirit
Unless you have been living under a rock, the turmoil and crisis within the Linux community these past weeks cannot have escaped you. And while not directly connected to Delphi or the Delphi Developer group on Facebook, the effects of a potential collapse within the core Linux development team will absolutely affect how Delphi developers go about their business. In the worst possible scenario, should the core team and it’s immediate extended developers decide to walk away, their code walks with them. Rendering much of the work countless companies have invested in the platform unreliable at best – or in need of a rewrite at worst (there is a legal blind-spot in GPL revision 1 and 2, allowing developers to rescind their code).
Large parts of the kernel would have to be re-invented, a huge chunk of the sub-strata and bedrock that distributions like Ubuntu, Mint, Kali and others rests on – could risk being removed, or rescinded as the term may be, from the core repositories. And perhaps worst of all, the hundreds of patches and new features yet to be released might never see the light of day.
To underline just how dire the situation has been the past couple of weeks, Richard Stallman, Eric S. Raymond, Linus Torvalds and others are threatening, openly and legally, to pull all their code (September 20th, Linux Kernel Mailing List) if the bullying by a handful of activist groups doesn’t stop. Linus is still in limbo having accepted the code of conduct these activist demand implemented, but has yet to return to work.
Linus Torvalds is famous for many things, but his personality is not one of them
But the interesting part of the Linux debacle is not the if’s and but’s, but rather the methods used by these groups to get their way. How can you enforce a “code of conduct” using methods that themselves are in violation with that code of conduct? It really is a case of “do as I say, not as I do”; And it has escalated into a gutter fight masquerading as social warfare where slander, stigmata, false accusations and personal attacks of the worst possible type are the weapons. All of which is now having a real and tangible impact on business and technology.
Morally bankrupt actions is not activism
These activists, if they deserve that title, even went as far as deciding to dig into the sexual-life of one of the kernel developers. And when finding out that he was into BDSM (a form of sexual role-play), they publicly stigmatized the coder as a rape sympathizer (!). Not because it’s true, but because the verbal association alone makes it easier for bullies like Coraline to justify the social execution of a man in public.
What makes my jaw drop in all this, is the complete lack of compassion these so-called activists demonstrate. They seem blind to the price of such stigmata for the innocent; not to mention the insult to people who have suffered sexual abuse in their lives. For each false accusation of rape that is made, the difficulty for actual abuse victims to seek justice increases exponentially. It is a heartless, unforgivable act.
Personally, I can’t say I understand the many sexual preferences people have these days. I find myself googling what the different abbreviations mean. The movie 50 shades of gray revolved around this stuff. But one thing is clear: as long as there are consenting adults involved, it is none of our business. If there is evidence of a crime, then it should be brought before the courts. And no matter what we might feel about the subject at hand, it can never justify stigmatizing a person for the rest of his life. Not only is this a violation of the very code of conduct these groups wants implemented – it’s also illegal in most of the civilized world. And damn immoral and out-of-line if you ask me.
The goal cannot justify the means
The irony in all of this, is that the accusation came from Coraline herself. A transgender woman born in the wrong body; a furious feminist now busy fighting to put an end to bullying of transgender minorities in the workplace (which she claims is the reason she got fired from Github). Yet she has no problems being the worst kind of bully herself on a global scale. I question if Coraline is even morally fit to represent a code of conduct. I mean, to even use slander such as rape-sympathizer in context with getting a code of conduct implemented? Digging into someones personal life and then using their sexual preference as leverage? It is utterly outrageous!
It is unacceptable and has no place in civilized society. Nor does a code of conduct, beyond ordinary expectations of decency and tolerance, have any place in a rebel motivated R&D movement like Linux.
Linux is not Windows or OS X. It was born out of the free software movement back in the late 1960’s (Stallman with GNU) and the Scandinavian demo and hacker scene during the 80’s and 90’s (the Linux kernel that GNU rests on). This is hacker territory and what people might feel about this in 2018 it utterly irrelevant. These are people that start the day with 4Chan for pete sake! The primary motivation of Stallman and Linus is to undermine, destroy and bury Microsoft and Apple in particular. And they have made no secret of this agenda.
Expecting Linux or their makers to be politically correct is infantile and naive, because Linux is at its heart a rebellion, “a protest of technical excellence and access to technology undermining commercial tyranny and corporate slavery”. That is not my personal opinion, that is straight out of a Richard Stallman book Free as in Freedom; His papers reads more like a religious manifesto; a philosophical foundation for a technological utopia, seeded and influenced by the hippie spirit of the 1960s. Which is where Stallman’s heart comes from.
You cannot but admire Stallman for sticking to his principles for 50+ years. And thinking he is going to just roll over because activists in this particular decade has a beef with how hackers address each other or comment their code, well — I don’t think these activists understand the hacker community at all. If they did they would back off and stop poking dragons.
Linux vs the sensitivity movement?
Yesterday I posted a video article that explained some of this in simple, easy terms on Delphi Developer. I picked the video that summed up the absurdities involved (as outlined above) as quickly as possible, rather than some 80 minute talk on YouTube. We have a long tradition of posting interesting IT news, things that are indirectly connected with Delphi, C++ builder or programming in general. We also post articles that have no direct connection at all – except being headlines within the world of IT. This helps people stay aware of interesting developments, trends and potential investments.
The head of the “moral codex” doesn’t strike me as unbiased and without an axe to grind
As far as politics is concerned I have no interest what so ever. Nor would I post political material in the group because our focus is technology, Delphi, object pascal and software development in general. The exception being if there is a bill or law passed in the US or EU that affects how we build applications or handle data.
Well, this post was no different.
What was different was that some individuals are so acclimatized to political debate that they interpret everything as a political statement. So criticism of the methods used are made synonymous with criticism of a cause. This can happen to the best of us; human beings are passionate animals and I think we can all agree that politics has taken up an unusual amount of space lately. I can’t ever remember politics causing so much bitterness, divide and hate as it does today. Nor can I remember sound reason being pushed aside in favour of immediate emotional trends. And it really scares me.
Anyways, I wrote that “I stand by my god given rights to write obscene comments in my code“. Which is a reference to one of the topics Linus is being flamed for, namely his use of the F word in his own code. My argument is that, the kernel is ultimately Torvalds work, and it’s something he gives away for free. I dont have any need for obscenity in my code, but I sure as hell reserve the right to do so in my personal projects. How two external groups (in this case a very aggressive feminist group combined with LGBTQIA) should have any say in how Linus formats his code (or you for that matter) or the comments he writes – it makes no sense. It’s free, take it or leave it. And if you join a team and feel offended by how things are done, you either ignore it or leave.
It might not be appropriate of Linus to use obscenity in his comments, but do you really want people to tell you what you can or cannot write in your own code? Lord knows there are pascal units online that have language unfit for publishing, but nobody is forcing you to use them. I cant stand Java but I dont join their forums and sit there like a 12 year old bitching about how terrible Java is. It’s just infantile, absurd mentality.
So that is what my reference was to, and I took for granted that people would pick up on that since Linus is infamous for his spectacular rants in the kernel (and verbally in interviews). Some of his commits have more rants than code, which I find hilarious. There is a collection of them online and people read them for kicks because he is, for all means and purposes, the Gordon Ramsey of programming.
And I also made a reference to “tree hugging millennial moralists”. Not exactly hard-core statements in these trying times. We live in a decade where vegan customers are looking to sue restaurants for serving meat. Maybe I’m old-fashioned but for me, that is like something out of Monty Python or Mad Magazine. I respect vegans, but I will not be dictated by them.
I mean, the group people call millennials is after all recognized as a distinct generation due to a pattern of unreasonable demands on society (and in extreme cases, reality itself). In some parts of the world this is a real problem, because you have a whole generation that expects to bag upper-management salary on a paper route. When this is not met you face a tantrum and aggressiveness that should not exist beyond a certain age. Having a meltdown like a six-year-old when you are twenty-six is, well, not something I’m even remotely interested in dealing with.
And I speak from experience here, I had the misfortune of working with one extreme case for a couple of years. He had a meltdown roughly once a month and verbally abused everyone in the office. Including his boss. I still can’t believe he put up with it for so long, a lesser man would have physically educated him on the spot.
The sensitivity movement
But (and this is important) like always, a stereotype is never absolute. The majority within the millennial age group are nothing like these extreme cases. In fact we have two administrators in Delphi Developer that both fall under the millennial age group – yet they are the exact opposite of the stereotype. They are extremely hard-working, demonstrate good moral and good behavior, they give of themselves to the community and are people I am proud to call my friends.
The people I refer to as the sensitivity movement consists of men and women that hold, in my view, demands to life that are unreasonable. We live in times where for some reason, and don’t ask me why, minorities have gotten away with terrible things (slander, straw-men tactics, blame shifting, perversion of facts, verbal abuse, planting dangerous rumours and false accusation; things that can ruin a person for life) to impose their needs opposed to the greater good and majority. And no, this has nothing to do with politics, it has to do with expectation of normal decency and minding your own business. As a teenager I had my share of rebellion (some would say three shares), but I never blamed society; instead I wanted to understand why society was the way it is, which led me to studying history, comparative religion and philosophy.
The minorities of 2018 have no interest in understanding why, they mistake preference with offence, confuse kindness with weakness – and are painfully unable to discern knowledge from wisdom. The difference between fear and respect might be subtle, but on reflection a person should make important discoveries about their own nature. Yet this seem utterly lost on men and women in their 20s today.
And just to make things crystal clear: the minorities I am referring to here as the so-called sensitivity movement, are not the underprivileged or individuals suffering a disadvantage. The minorities are in fact highly privileged individuals – enjoying the very freedom of expression they so eagerly want taken away from people they don’t like. That is a very dangerous path.
Linux, the bedrock of the anti-establishment movement
The Linux community has a history of being difficult. Personally I find them both helpful and kind, but the core motivation behind Linux as a phenomenon cannot be swept under the carpet or ignored: these are rebels, rogues, people who refuse to bend the knee.
Linux itself is an act of defiance, and it exists due to two key individuals who both are extremely passionate by nature, namely Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds.
Attacking these from all sides is shameful. I find no other words for it. Especially since its not a matter of principles or sound moral values, but rather a matter of pride and selfish ideals.
Name calling will not be tolerated
The reason I wrote this post was not to involve everyone in the dire situation of Linux, at least not to bring an external problem into our community and make it our problem. It was news that is of some importance.
I wrote this blogpost because a member somehow nicknamed me as “maga right-wing” something. And I’m not even sure how to respond to something like that.
First of all I have no clue what maga even is, I think it’s that cap slogan trump uses? Make america great again or something like that? Secondly, I live in Norway and know very little of the intricacies of domestic american politics. I have voted left for some 20 years, with exception of last norwegian election when I voted center. How my respect for Stallman and Linus, and how the hacker community operates (I grew up in the hacker community) – somehow connects me to some political agenda on another continent, is quite frankly beyond me.
But this is exactly the thing I wrote about above – the method being deployed by these groups. A person read something he or she doesn’t like, connects that to a pre-defined personality type, this is then supposed to justify wild accusations – and he or she then proceeded directly to treating someone accordingly. THAT behavior IS offensive to me, because there should be a dialog quite early in that chain of events. We have dialog to avoid causing harm – not as a means to cause further damage.
Is it the end of Linux as we know it?
No. Linus has been a loud mouth for ages, and he actually have people who purge his code of swear words (which is kinda funny) – but he has accepted the code of conduct and taken some time off.
The threat Stallman and the core team has made however is very real, meaning that the inner circle of Linux developers can flick the kill switch if they want to, but I think the negative press Coraline and those forcing their agenda onto the Linux foundation is getting, will make them regret it. And of course, articles like the New Yorker published didn’t help the situation.
Having said that, these developers are not normal people. Normal is a cut of average behavior. And neither Stallman, Linus of the hacker community fall under the term “normal” in the absolutesense of the word. Not a single individual that has done something of importance technologically fall under that group. Nor do they have any desire to be normal either, which is a death sentence in the hacker community. The lowest, most worthless status you can hold as a hacker, is normal.
These are people who build operating systems for fun. They are passion driven, artistic and highly emotional. And as such they could, should more gutter tricks be deployed, decide to burn the house down before they hand it over.
So it’s an interesting case well worth keeping an eye on. Preferably one that doesn’t add or subtract from what is there.
Nano PI Fire 3, part two
If you missed the first installment of this test, please click here to catch up. In this installment we are just going to dive straight into general use and get a feel for what can and cannot be done.
Solving the power problem
Like mentioned in the previous article, a normal mobile charger (5 volt, 2 amps) is not enough to support the nano-pi. Since I have misplaced my original PI power-supply with 5 volt / 3 amps I decided to cheat. So I plugged the power USB into my PC which will deliver as much juice as the device needs. I don’t have time to wait for a new PSU to arrive so this will have to do.
But for the record (and underlined) a proper PSU with at least 2.5 amps is essential to using this board. I suggest you order the official Raspberry PI 3b power-supply. But if you should find one with 3 amps that would be even better.
Web performance
The question on everyone’s mind (or at least mine) is: how does the Nano-PI fire 3 perform when rendering cutting edge, hardcore HTML5? Is this little device a potential candidate for running “The Smart Desktop” (a.k.a Amibian.js for those of you coming from the retro-computing scene)?
Like I suspected earlier, X (the Linux windowing framework) doesn’t have drivers that deliver hardware acceleration at all.
Lubuntu is a sexy desktop no doubt there, but it’s overkill for this device
This is quite easy to test: when selecting a rectangle on the Lubuntu desktop and moving the mouse-cursor around (holding down the left mouse button at the same time) if it lags terribly, that is a clear indicator that no acceleration exists.
And I was right on the money because there is no acceleration what so ever for the Linux distribution. It struggles hopelessly to keep up with the mouse-pointer as you move it around with an active selection; something that would be silky smooth had the GPU been tasked with the job.
But, hardware acceleration is not just about the desktop. It’s not some flag you enable and it magically effect everything, but rather several API’s at either the kernel-level or immediate driver level (modules the kernel loads), each affecting different aspects of a system.
So while the desktop “2d blitting” is clearly cpu driven, other aspects of the system can still be accelerated (although that would be weird and rare. But considering how Asus messed up the Tinkerboard I guess anything goes these days).
Asking Chrome for the hard facts
I fired up Google Chrome (which is the default browser thank god) and entered the magic url:
chrome://gpu
This is a built-in page that avails a detailed report of what Chrome learns about the current system, right down to specific GPU features used by OpenGL.
As expected, there was NO acceleration what so ever. So I was quite surprised that it managed to run Amibian.js at all. Even without hardware acceleration it outperformed the Raspberry PI 3b+ by a factor of 4 (at the very least) and my particle demo ran at a whopping 8 fps (frames per second). The original Rasperry PI could barely manage 2 fps. So the Nano-PI Fire is leagues ahead of the PI in terms of raw cpu power, which is brilliant for headless servers or computational tasks.
FriendlyCore vs Lubuntu? QT for the win
Now here is a funny thing. So far I have used the Lubuntu standard Linux image, and performance has been interesting to say the least. No hardware acceleration, impressive cpu results but still – what good is a SBC Linux distro without fast graphics? Sure, if you just want a head-less file server or host services then you don’t need a beefy GPU. But here is the twist:
Turns out the makers of the board has a second, QT oriented distro called Friendly-core. And this image has OpenGL-ES support and all the missing acceleration lacking from Lubuntu.
I was pretty annoyed with how Asus gave users the run-around with Tinkerboard downloads, but they have thankfully cleaned up their act and listened to their customers. Friendly-elec might want to learn from Asus mistakes in this area.
QT has a rich history, but it’s being marginalized by node.js and Delphi these days
Alas, Friendly-core xenial 4.4 Arm64 image turned out to be a pure embedded development image. This is why the board has a debug port (which is probably awesome if you are into QT development). So this is for QT developers that want to use the board as a single-application system where they write the code on Windows or Linux, compile and it’s all transported to the board with live debugging back to the devtools they use. In other words: not very useful for non C/C++ QT developers.
Android Lolipop
I have only used Android on a pad and the odd Samsung Galaxy phone, so this should be interesting. I Downloaded the Lolipop disk image, burned it to the sd-card and booted up.
After 20 minutes with a blank screen i gave up.
I realize that some Android distros download packages ad-hoc and install directly from a repository, so it can take some time to get started; but 15-20 minutes with a black screen? The Android logo didn’t even show up — and that should be visible almost immediately regardless of network install or not.
This is really a great shame because I wanted to test some Delphi Firemonkey applications on it, to see how well it scales the more demanding GPU tasks. And yes i did try a different SD-Card to be sure it wasnt a disk error. Same result.
Back to Lubuntu
Having spent a considerable time trying to find a “wow” factor for this board, I have to just surrender to the fact that it’s just not there. . This is not a “PI” any more than the Tinkerboard is a PI. And appending “pi” to a product name will never change that.
I can imagine the Nano-PI Fire 3 being an awesome single-application board for QT C/C++ developers though. With a dedicated debug port making it a snap to transport, execute and do live debugging directly on the hardware — but for general DIY hacking, using it for native Android development with Delphi, or node.js development with Smart Mobile Studio – or just kicking back with emulators like Mame, UAE or whatever tickles your fancy — its just too rough around the edges. Which is really a shame!
So at the end of the day I re-installed Lubuntu and figure I just have to wait until Friendly-elec get their act together and issue proper drivers for the Mali GPU. So it’s $35 straight out the window — but I can live with that. It was a risk but at that price it’s not going to break the bank.
The positive thing
The Nano-PI Fire 3 is yet another SBC in a long list that fall short of its potential. Like many others they try to use the word “PI” to channel some of the Raspberry PI enthusiasm their way – but the quality of the actual system is not even close.
In fact, using PI in their product name is setting themselves up for a fall – because customers will quickly discover that this product is not a PI, which can cause some subconscious aversion and resentment.
The Nano rendered Amibian.js running some very demanding demos 4 times as fast as the PI 3b, one can only speculate what the board could do with proper drivers for the GPU.
The only positive feature the Fire-3 clearly has to offer, is abundantly more cpu power. It is without a doubt twice as fast (if not 3 times as fast) as the Raspberry PI 3b. The fact that it can render highly demanding and complex HTML5 demos 4 times faster than the Raspberry PI 3b without hardware acceleration is impressive. This is a $35 board after all, which is the same price.
But without proper drivers for the mali, it’s a useless toy. Powerful and with great potential, but utterly useless for multimedia and everything that relies on fast 2D and 3D graphics. For UAE (Amiga emulation) you can pretty much forget it. Even if you can compile the latest UAE4Arm with SDL as its primary display framework – it wouldn’t work because SDL depends on the graphics drivers. So it’s back to square one.
But the CPU packs a punch that is without question.
Final verdict
There are a lot of stable and excellent options out there, take your time
I was planning to test UAE next but as I have outlined above: without drivers that properly expose and delegate the power of the mali, it would be a complete disaster. I’m not even sure it would build.
As such I will just leave this board as is. If it matures at some point that would be great, but my advice to people looking for a great SBC experience — get the new Raspberry PI 3b+ and enjoy learning and exploring there.
And if you are into Amibian.js or making high quality HTML5 kiosk / node.js based systems, then fork out the extra $10 and buy an ODroid XU4. If you pay $55 you can pick up the Asus Tinkerboard which is blistering fast and great value for money, despite its turbulent introduction.
Note: You cannot go wrong with the ODroid XU4. Its affordable, stable and fast. So for beginners it’s either the Raspberry PI 3b+ or the ODroid. These are the most mature in terms of software, drivers and stability.
Power for pennies, getting a server rack and preparing my ultimate coding environment
One of the benefits of doing repairs on your house, is that during the cleanup process you come over stuff you had completely forgot about. Like two very powerful Apple blade servers (x86) I received as a present three years ago. I never got around to using them because I there was literally no room in my house for a rack cabinet.
Sure, a medium model rack cabinet isn’t that big (the size of a cabin refrigerator), but you also have to factor in that servers are a lot more noisy than desktop PCs; the older they are the more noise they make. So unless you have a good spot to place the cabinet, where the noise wont make it unbearable to be around, I suggest you just rent a virtual instance at Amazon or something. It really depends on how much service coding you do, if you need to do dedicated server and protocol stress testing (the list goes on).
Power for pennies
Sellers photo. It needs a good clean, but this kit would have set you back $5000 a decade ago; so picking this up for $400 is almost ridicules.
The price of such cabinets (when buying new ones) can be anything from $800 to $5000 depending on the capacity, features and materials. My needs for a personal server farm are more than covered by a medium cabinet. If it wasnt for my VMWare needs I would say it was overkill. But some of my work, especially with node.js and Delphi system services that should handle terabytes of raw data reliably 24/7, that demands a hard-core testing environment.
Having stumbled upon my blade servers I decided to check the local second-hand online forum; and I was lucky enough to find (drumroll) a second-hand cabinet holding a total of 10 blades for $400. So I’ll be picking up this beauty next weekend. It will be so good to finally get my blades organized. Not to mention all my SBC / Node.js cluster experiments centralized in one physical location. Far away from my home office space (!)
Interestingly, it comes fitted with 3 older servers. There are two Dell web and file servers, and then a third, unmarked mystery box (i3 cpu + sata caddies so that sounds good).
It really is amazing how much cpu fire-power you can pick up for practically nothing these days. $50 buys you a SBC (single board computer) that will rival a Pentium. $400 buys you a 10 blade cabinet and 3 servers that once powered a national newspaper (!).
VMWare delights
All the blades I have mentioned so far are older models. They are still powerful machines, way more than $400 livingroom NAS would get you. So my node.js clustering will run like a dream and I will be able to host all my Delphi development environments via VMware. Which brings us neatly to the blade I am really looking forward to get into the rack.
I bought an empty server blade case back in 2015. It takes a PSU, motherboard, fans and everything else is there (even the six caddies for disks). Into this seemingly worthless metal box I put a second generation Intel i7 monster (Asus motherboard), with 32 gigabyte ram – and fitted it with a sexy NVidia GEFORCE GTX 1080 TI.
All my Delphi work, Smart work and various legacy projects I maintain, all in one neat rack
This little monster (actually it takes up 2 blade-spots) allows me to run VMWare server, which gives me at least 10 instances of Windows (or Linux, or OSX) at the same time. It will also be able to host and manage roughly 1000 active Smart Desktop users (the bottleneck will be the disk and network more than actual computation).
Being a coder in 2018 is just fantastic!
Things we could only dream about a decade ago can now be picked up for close to nothing (compared to the original cost). Just awesome!
Smart Pascal file enumeration under node.js
Ok. I admit it. Writing an RTL from scratch has been one of the hardest tasks I have ever undertaken. Thankfully I have not been alone, but since I am the lead developer for the RTL, it naturally falls on me to keep track of the thousands of classes it comprises; how each affect the next, the many inheritance chains and subsequent causality timelines that each namespace represents.
We were the first company in the world to do this, to establish the compiler technology and then author a full RTL on top of that – designed to wrap and run on top of the JavaScript virtual machine. To be blunt, we didn’t have the luxury to looking at what others had done before us. For every challenge we have had to come up with solutions ourselves.
Be that as it may, after seven years we have gotten quite good at framework architecture. So whenever we need to deal with a new runtime environment such as node.js – we have already built up a lot of experience with async JSVM development, so we are able to absorb and adapt much faster than our competitors.
Digging into a new platform
Whenever I learn a new language, I typically make a little list of “how do I do this?” type questions. It can be simple, like writing text to stdout, or more elaborate like memory mapped files, inheritance model, raw memory access and similar topics.
But one of the questions have always been: how do I enumerate files in a folder?
While this question is trivial at best, it stabs at the heart of the sub structure of any language. On operating systems like Linux a file is not just data on a disk like we are used to from Windows. A file can be a socket, a virtual access point exposed by the kernel, a domain link, a symbolic link or a stream. So my simple question is actually motivated to expose the depth of the language im learning. I then write down whatever topics come up and then research / experiment on them separately.
Node, like the browser, executes code asynchronously. This means that the code you write cannot be blocking (note: node does support synchronous file IO methods, but you really don’t want to use them in a server. They are typically used before the server is started to load preferences files and data).
As you can imagine, this throws conventional coding out the window. Node exposes a single function that returns an array of filenames (array of string), which helps, but it tells you nothing about the files. You don’t get the size, the type, create and modify timestamps – just the names.
To get the information I just mentioned you have to call a function called “fs.stat”. This is a common POSIX filesystem command. But again we face the fact that everything is async, so that “for / next” loop is useless.
Luke Filewalker
In version 3.0 of Smart Mobile Studio our Node.JS namespace (collection of units with code) has been upgraded and expanded considerably. We have thrown out almost all our older dependencies (like utf8.js and base64.js) and implemented these as proper codec classes in Smart Pascal directly.
Our websocket framework has been re-written from scratch. We threw out the now outdated websocket-io and instead use the standard “ws” framework that is the most popular and actively maintained module on NPM.
We have also implemented the same storage-device class that is available in the browser, so that you can write file-io code that works the same both server-side and client-side. The changes are in the hundreds so I wont iterate through them all here, they will be listed in detail on the release-notes document when the time comes.
But what is a server without a fast, reliable way of enumerating files?
Well, here at the Smart Company we use our own products. So when writing servers and node micro-services we face the exact same challenges as our customers would. Our job is to write ready solutions for these problems, so that you don’t have to spend days and weeks re-inventing the wheel.
Enumerating files is handled by the class TNJFileWalker (I was so tempted to call it Luke). This takes care of everything for you, all the nitty-gritty is neatly packed into a single, easy to use class.
Here is an example:
Enumerating files has literally been reduced to childs play
The class also expose the events you would expect, including a filtering event where you can validate if a file should be included in the final result. You can even control the dispatching speed (or delay between item processing) which is helpful for payload balancing. If you have 100 active users all scanning their files at the same time -you probably want to give node the chance to breathe (20ms is a good value).
The interface for the class is equally elegant and easy to understand:
What would you prefer to maintain? 500.000 lines of JavaScript or 20.000 lines of pascal?
Compare that to some of the spaghetti JavaScript developers have to live with just to perform a file-walk and then do a recursive “delete folder”. Sure hope they check for “/” so they don’t kill the filesystem root by accident.
const fs = require('fs');
const path = require('path');
function filewalker(dir, done) {
let results = [];
fs.readdir(dir, function(err, list) {
if (err) return done(err);
var pending = list.length;
if (!pending) return done(null, results);
list.forEach(function(file){
file = path.resolve(dir, file);
fs.stat(file, function(err, stat){
// If directory, execute a recursive call
if (stat && stat.isDirectory()) {
// Add directory to array [comment if you need to remove the directories from the array]
results.push(file);
filewalker(file, function(err, res){
results = results.concat(res);
if (!--pending) done(null, results);
});
} else {
results.push(file);
if (!--pending) done(null, results);
}
});
});
});
};
function deleteFile(dir, file) {
return new Promise(function (resolve, reject) {
var filePath = path.join(dir, file);
fs.lstat(filePath, function (err, stats) {
if (err) {
return reject(err);
}
if (stats.isDirectory()) {
resolve(deleteDirectory(filePath));
} else {
fs.unlink(filePath, function (err) {
if (err) {
return reject(err);
}
resolve();
});
}
});
});
};
function deleteDirectory(dir) {
return new Promise(function (resolve, reject) {
fs.access(dir, function (err) {
if (err) {
return reject(err);
}
fs.readdir(dir, function (err, files) {
if (err) {
return reject(err);
}
Promise.all(files.map(function (file) {
return deleteFile(dir, file);
})).then(function () {
fs.rmdir(dir, function (err) {
if (err) {
return reject(err);
}
resolve();
});
}).catch(reject);
});
});
});
};
The Tinkerboard Strikes Back
For those that follow my blog you probably remember the somewhat devastating rating I gave the Tinkerboard earlier this year (click here for part 1, and here for part 2). It was quite sad having to give such a poor rating to what is ultimately a fine piece of hardware. I had high hopes for it – in fact I bought two of the boards because I figured there was no way it could suck with that those specs. But suck it did and while the muscle was there, the drivers were in such a state that it never emerged for the user. It was released prematurely, and I think most people that bought it agrees on this.
The initial release was less than bad, it was horrible
Since my initial review those months ago good things have happened. Asus seem to have listened to the “poonami” of negative feedback and adapted their website accordingly. Unlike the first time I visited when you literally had to dig into recursive menus (which was less than intuitive in this case) just to download the software – the disk images are now available at the bottom of the product page. So thumbs up for that (!)
They have also made the GPIO programming API a lot easier to get; downloading it is reduced to a “one liner” for C developers, which is the way it should be. And they have likewise provided wrappers for other languages, like ever popular python and scratch.
I am a bit disappointed that they don’t provide freepascal units. A lot of developers use object pascal on these board after all, because Object Pascal gives you a better balance between productivity and depth. Pascal is easier to learn (it was designed for that after all) but avoids some of the pitfalls of C/C++ while retaining all the good things. Porting over C headers is fairly easy for a good pascal programmer – but it would be cool of Asus remember that there are more languages in the world than C and python.
All of this aside: the most important change of all is what Asus has done with the drivers! They have finally put together drivers that shows off the capabilities of the hardware and unleash the speed we all hoped for when the board was first announced. And man does it show! My previous experience with the Tinkerboard was horrible; it was the text-book example of a how not to release a product (the whole release has been odd; Asus is a huge, multi-national corporation. Yet their release had basement 3 man band written all over it).
So this is fantastic news! Finally the Tinkerboard delivers and can be used for real life projects!
Smart IOT
At The Smart Company we both create and use our core product, Smart Mobile Studio, to deliver third-party solutions. As the name implies Smart is a software development system initially made for mobile applications; but it quickly grew into a much larger toolchain and is exceptionally good for making embedded applications. With embedded applications I mean things that run on kiosk systems, cash machines and stuff like that; basically anything with a touch-screen that does something.
The Smart desktop gives you a good starting point for embedded work
One of the examples that ship with Smart Pascal is a fully working desktop embedded environment. Smart compiles for both ordinary browsers (JavaScript environments with a traditional HTML5 display) but also for node.js, which is JavaScript unbound by the strict rules of a browser. Developers typically use node.js to write highly scalable server software, but you are naturally not limited to that. Netflix is written 100% in Node.js, so we are talking serious firepower here.
Our embedded environment is called The Smart Desktop (also known as Amibian.js) and gives you a ready-made node.js back-end that couples with a HTML5 front-end. This is a ready to use environment that you can deploy your own applications through. Things like storage, a nice looking UI, user logon and credentials and much, much more is all implemented for you. You don’t have to use it of course, you can write your own system from scratch if you like. We created “Amibian” to demonstrate just how powerful Smart Pascal can be in the right hands.
With this in mind – my main concern when testing SBC’s (single board computers) is obviously web performance. By default JavaScript is a single core event-driven runtime system; you can spawn threads of course but its done somewhat different from how you would work in Delphi or C++. JavaScript is designed to be system friendly and a gentle giant if you like, which has turned out to be a good thing – because the way JS schedules execution makes it ideal for clustering!
Most people find it hard to believe that JavaScript can outperform native code, but the JavaScript runtimes of today is almost a whole eco system in themselves. With JIT compilers and LLVM optimization — it’s a whole new ballgame.
Making a scale
To give you a better context to see where the Tinkerboard is on a scale, I decided to set up a couple of simple tests. Nothing fancy, just running the same web applications and see how each of them perform on different boards. So I used the same 3 candidates as before, namely the Raspberry PI 3b, the Hardkernel ODroid XU4 and last but not least: the Asus Tinkerboard.
I setup the following applications to compile with the desktop system, meaning that they were compiled with the Smart project. We got plenty of web applications but for this I wanted to pack the most demanding apps in our library:
- Skid-Row intro remake using the CODEF library
- Quake 3 asm.js build
- Plex
OK let’s go through them and see where the chips land!
The Raspberry PI 3b
Bassoon ran well, its not that demanding
The Raspberry PI was aweful (click here for a video). There is no doubt that native applications like UAE4Arm runs extremely well on the PI (which contains hand optimized assembler, not exactly a fair fight)- but when it comes to modern HTML5 the PI doesn’t stand a chance. You could perhaps use a Raspberry PI 3b for simple applications which are not graphic and cpu intensive, but you can forget about anything remotely taxing.
It ran Bassoon reasonably fast, but all in all you really don’t want a raspberry when doing high quality IOT, unless its headless code and node.js perhaps. Frameworks like Johnny #5 gives you a ton of GPIO features out of the box – in fact you can target 40 embedded systems without any change to your code. But for large, high quality web front-ends, the PI just wont cut it.
- Skid-Row: 1 frame per second or less
- Quake: Can’t even start, just forget it
- Plex: Starts but it lags so much you can’t watch anything
But hey, I never expected $35 to give me a kick ass ARM experience anyways. There are 1000 things the PI does very well, but HTML is not one of them.
ODroid XU4
The ODroid packs a lot of power!
The ODroid being faster than the Raspberry PI is nothing new, but I was surprised at how much power this board delivers. I never expected it to give me a Linux experience close to that of a x86 PC; I mean we are talking about a 45€ SBC here. And it’s only 10€ more than the Raspberry PI, which is a toy at best. But the ODroid XU4 delivers a good Linux desktop; And it’s well worth the extra 10€ when compared to the PI.
Personally I don’t understand why people keep buying PI’s when there is so much better options on the market now. At least not if web technology is involved. A small server or emulator sure, but not HTML5 and browsers. The PI just cant handle it.
- Skid-Row: 4-5 frames per second
- Quake: Runs at very enjoyable speed (!)
- Plex: Runs well but you may want to pick SD or 720p to avoid lags
What really shocked me was that ODroid XU4 can run Quake.js! The PI can’t even start that because it’s so demanding. It is one of the largest and most resource hungry asm.js projects out there – but ODroid XU4 did a fantastic job.
Now it’s not a silky smooth experience, I would guess something along the lines of 17-20 fps. But you know what? Thats pretty good for a $45 board.
I have owned far worse x86 PC’s in my day.
The Tinkerboard
Before i powered up the board I was reluctant to push it too far, because I thought it would fail me once again. I did hope that something had been done by Asus to rectify the situation though, because Asus really should have done a better job before releasing it. It’s now been roughly 6 months since I bought it, and roughly 8 months since it was released here in Europe. It would have been better for them to have waited with the release. I was not alone about butchering the whole board, its been a source of frustration for those that bought it. 75€ is not much, but no-one likes to throw money out the window like that.
Long story short: I downloaded the latest Ubuntu image and burned that to an SD card (I actually first downloaded the Debian Jessie image they have, but sadly you have to do a bit of work to turn that into a desktop system – so I decided to go for Ubuntu instead). If the drivers are in order I have a feeling the Jessie image will be even faster – Ubuntu has always been a high-quality distribution, but it’s also one of the most demanding. One might even say it’s become bloated. But it does deliver a near Microsoft Windows like experience which has served the Linux community well.
But the Tinkerboard really delivers! (click here for the video) Asus have cleaned up their act and implemented the drivers properly, and you can feel that the moment the desktop comes into view. With the PI you are always fighting with lagging performance. When you start a program the whole system freezes for a while, when you quit a program the system freezes – hell when you move the mouse around the system bloody freezes! Well that is not the case with the Tinkerboard that’s for sure. The tinkerboard feels more like running vanilla Ubuntu on a normal x86 PC to be honest.
- Skid-Row: 10-15 frames per second
- Quake: Full screen 32bit graphics, runs like hell
- Plex: Plays back fullscreen HD, just awesome!
All I can say is this: if you are going to do any bit of embedded coding, regardless if you are using Smart Mobile Studio or some other devkit — this is the board to get (!)
Like already mentioned it does cost almost twice as much as the PI, but that extra 30€ buys you loads of extra power. It opens up so many avenues of code and you can explore software far more complex than both the PI and ODroid combined. With the tinkerboard you can finally deliver a state of the art product built with off the shelves web components. It’s in a league of its own.
The ‘tinker’ rocks at last
When I first bought the tinker i felt cheated. It was so frustrating because the specs were so good and the terrible performance just came down to sloppy work and Asus releasing it prematurely for cash (lets face it, they tapped into the lucrative market established by the PI foundation). By looking at the specs you knew it had the firepower to deliver so much, but it was held back by ridicules drivers.
There is still a lot that can be done to make the Tinkerboard run even faster. Like I mentioned Ubuntu is not the racecar of distributions out there. Ubuntu is fat, there is no other way of saying it. So if someone took the time to create a minimalistic Jessie image, recompile every piece with maximum llvm optimization and as few running services as possible — the tinkerboard would positively fly!
So do I recommend it? I am thrilled to say that yes, I can finally recommend the tinkerboard! It is by far the coolest board in my collection now. In fact it’s so good that I’m donating one to my daughter. She is presently using an iMac which is overkill for her needs at age 10. Now I can make a super simple menu with Netflix and Youtube, buy a nice touch-screen display and wall mount it in her room.
Well done Asus!
Amibian.js on bitbucket
The Smart Pascal driven desktop known as Amibian.js is available on bitbucket. It was hosted in a normal github repository earlier – so make sure you clone out from this one.
About Amibian.js
Amibian is a desktop environment written in Smart Pascal. It compiles to JavaScript and can be used through any modern HTML5 compliant browser. The project consists of both a client and server, both written in smart pascal. The server is executed by node.js (note: please install PM2 to have better control over scaling and task management: http://pm2.keymetrics.io/).
Amibian.js is best suited for embedded projects, such as kiosk systems. It has been used in tutoring software for schools, custom routers and a wide range of different targets. It can easily be molded into a rich environment for SAD (single application devices) based software – but also made to act more as a real operating system:
- Class driven filesystem, easy to target external services
- Ram device-type
- Browser cache device-type
- ZIPfile device-type
- Node.js device-type
- Cross domain application hosting
- Traditional IPC protocol between hosted application and desktop
- Shared resources
- css styling
- glyphs and images
- Event driven visual controls
- Windowing manager makes it easy to implement custom applications
- Support for fullscreen API
Amibian ships with UAE.js (based on the SAE.js codebase) making it possible to run Amiga software directly on the desktop surface.
The bitbucket repository is located here: https://bitbucket.org/hexmonks/client
FMX 4 linux gets an update
The Firemonkey framework that allows you to compile for Linux desktop (Linux x86 server is already supported) just got a nice update. Amoung the changes is a nice Radial Gradient pattern – and several bugs squashed.
This is an awesome addition if you already have Delphi XE 10.2 and if writing Ubuntu desktop applications is something you want – then this is the package to get!
Check it out: http://fmxlinux.com/
Smart Pascal: Amibian vs. FriendOS
This is not a new question, and despite my earlier post I still get hammered with these on a weekly basis – so lets dig into this subject and clean it up.
I fully understand that for non-developers suddenly having two Amiga like web desktops can be a bit confusing; especially since they superficially at least do many of the same things. But there is actually a lot of co-incidence surrounding all this, as well as evolution of the general topic. People who work with a topic will naturally come up with the same ideas from time to time.
But ok, lets dig into this and clear away any confusion
You know about FriendOS right? It looks a lot like Amibian
Custom native web servers has been a part of Delphi for ages, so it’s not that exciting for us
“A lot” is probably stretching it. But ok: FriendOS is a custom server system with a sexy desktop front-end written in HTML5. So you have a server that is custom written to interact with the browser in a special way. This might sound like a revolution to non-developers but it’s actually an established technology; its been a part of Delphi and C++ builder for at least 12 years now (Intraweb being the best example, Raudus another). So if you are wondering why im not dazzled, it’s because this has been there for a while.
The whole point of Amibian.js is to demonstrate a different path; to get away from the native back-end and to make the whole system portable and platform independent. So in that regard the systems are diametrically different.
Custom web servers that talk to your web-app is old news. Delphi developers have done this for a decade at least and it’s not really interesting at this point. Node.js holds much greater promise.
What FriendOS has done that is unique, and that I think is super cool – is to couple their server with RDP (remote desktop protocol) and some nice video streaming for smooth video chat. Again these are off the shelves parts that anyone can add once you have a native back-end, it’s not really hard to code but time-consuming; especially when you are potentially dealing with large number of users spawning threads all over the place. I think Friend-Labs have done an exceptional good job here.
When you combine these features it creates the impression of an operating system like environment. And this is perfectly fine for ordinary users. It all depends on your needs and what exactly you use the computer for.
And just to set the war-mongers straight: FriendOS is not going up against Amibian. it’s going up against ChromeOS, Nayu and and a ton of similar systems; all of them with deep pockets and an established software portfolio. We focus on software development. Not even in the same ballpark.
To be perfectly frank: I see no real purpose for a web desktop except when connected to a context. There has to be an advantage beyond isolating web functions in one place. You need something special that your system does better than others, or different than others. Amibian has been about UAE.js and to run retro games in a familiar environment. And thus create a base that Amiga lovers can build on and play with. Again based on our prefab for customers that make embedded systems and use our compiler and RTL for that.
If you have a hardware product like a NAS, a ticket system or a retro-game machine and want to have a nice web front-end for it: then it makes sense. But there is absolutely nothing in both our systems that you can’t whip-up using Intraweb or Raudus in a few weeks. If you have the luxury of a native back-end, then adding Active Directory support is a matter of dropping a component. You can even share printers and USB devices over the wire if you like, this has been available to Delphi and c++ developers for ages. The “new” factor here, which FriendOS does very well i might add, is connectivity.
This might sound like criticism but it’s really not. It’s honesty and facts. They are going to need some serious cash to take on Google, Samsung, LG and various other players that have been doing similar things for a long time (or about to jump on the same concepts) — Amibian.js is for Amiga fans and people who use Smart Pascal to write embedded applications. We don’t see anything to compete with because Amibian is a prefab connected to a programming language. FriendOS is a unification system.
A programming language doesnt have the aspirations of a communication company. So the whole “oh who is best” or “are you the same” is just wrong.
Ok you say it’s not competing, but why not?
To understand Amibian.js you first need to understand Smart Pascal (see Wikipedia article on Smart Pascal). Smart Pascal (smartmobilestudio.com) is a software development studio for writing software using web technology rather than native machine-code. It allows you to create whatever you like, from games to servers, or kiosk software to the next Facebook clone.
Our focus is on enabling our customers to quickly program robust mobile applications, servers, kiosk software, games or large JavaScript projects; products that would otherwise be hard to manage if all you have is vanilla JavaScript. I mean why spend 2 years coding something when you can do it in 2 months using Smart? So a web desktop is just ridicules when you understand how large our codebase is and the scope of the product.
Under Smart Pascal what people know as Amibian.js is just a project type. There is no competition between FriendOS and Amibian because a web desktop represents a ridicules small piece of our examples; it’s literally mistaking the car for the factory. Amibian is not our product, it is a small demo and prefab (pre fabricated system that others can download and build on) project that people use to save time. So under Smart, creating your own web desktop is a piece of cake, it’s a click, and then you can brand it, expand it and do whatever you like with it. Just like you would any project you create in Visual Studio, Delphi or C++ builder.
So we are not in competition with FriendOS because we create and deliver development tools. Our customers use Smart Pascal to create web environments both large and small, and naturally we deliver what they need. You could easily create a FriendOS clone in Smart if you got the skill, but again – that is but a tiny particle in our codebase.
Really? Amibian.js is just a project under Smart Pascal?
Indeed. Our product delivers a full object-oriented pascal compiler, debugger and IDE. So you can write classes, use inheritance and enjoy all the perks of a high-level language — and then compile this to JavaScript.
You can target node.js, the browser and about 90+ embedded devices out of the box. The whole point of Smart Pascal is to avoid the PITA that is writing large applications in JavaScript. And we do this by giving you a classical programming language that was made especially for application authoring, and then compile that to JavaScript instead.
Amibian.js is just a tiny, tiny part of what Smart Pascal is all about
This is a massive undertaking that started back in 2009/2010 and involves a high-quality compiler, linker, debugger and code generator; a full IDE with a ton of capabilities and last but not least: a huge run-time library that allows you to work with the DOM (document object model, or HTML) and node.js from the vantage point of a programmer.
Most people approach web development as a designer. They write html and then style them using a stylesheet. They work with colors, aspects and pages. Which means people who traditionally write programs falls between two chairs: first they must learn about html and css, and secondly a language which is ill equipped for large scale applications (imagine writing adobe photoshop in nothing but JS. Sure it’s possible, but wouldnt you rather spend a month coding that than a year? In a language that actually makes sense?).
With Smart you approach web development like you do writing programs. You work with visual controls, change properties, write code in response to events. Even writing your own visual controls that you can re-use and inherit from later is both fun and easy. So rather than ending up with a huge was of spaghetti code, which sadly is the fate of most large-scale JavaScript projects — Smart lets you work like you are used to. In a language better suited for the task.
And yes, I was not kidding when I said this was a huge undertaking. The source code in our codebase is close to 2.5 gigabytes. And keep in mind that this is source-code and libraries. So it’s not something you slap together over the weekend.
The Smart source-code is close to 2.5 gigabytes. It has taken years to complete
But why do Amibian and FriendOS both focus on the Amiga?
That is pure co-incidence. The guys over at Friend Labs started out on the Amiga just like we did. So when I updated our desktop project (previously called Quartex Media Desktop) the Amiga look and feel came natural to me.
I’m a huge retro-computing fan that loves the Amiga. When I sat down to rewrite our window manager I loved the way Amiga OS 4.x looked, so I decided to implement an UI inspired by that.
People have to remember that the Amiga was a huge success in Scandinavia, so finding developers that are in their late 30s or early 40s that didn’t own an Amiga is harder than you think.
So the fact that we all root our ideas back to the Amiga is both co-incidence and a mutual passion for a great platform. One that really should have survived the financial onslaught of fat CEO’s and thir minions in the board.
But Amibian does a lot of what FriendOS does?
Probably. JavaScript is multi-tasking by default so if loading external URL’s into window containers, doing live resize and other things is what you refer to then yes. But that is the nature of web programming. Its like creating a bucket if you want to carry water; it is a natural first step of an evolutionary pattern. It’s not like FriendOS is copying us I would imagine.
For the record Smart started back in 2010 and the media desktop came in with the first hotfix, so its been available years before Friend-Labs even existed. Creating a desktop has not been a huge part of what we do because mobile applications, building a rich and solid run-time-library with hundreds of classes for our customers – and making an IDE that is great to use, that is our primary job.
We didn’t even know FriendOS existed. Let alone that it was a Norwegian product.
But you posted that you worked for FriendOS earlier?
Yes I did, very briefly. I was offered a position and I worked there for a month. It was a chance to work side by side with legends like David John Pleasance, ex head of Commodore for europe; and also my childhood hero Francois Lionet, author of Amos Basic for the Amiga way back in the 80’s and 90s.
We never forget our childhood heroes
Sadly we had our wires crossed. I am an awesome object pascal developer, while the guys at Friend-Labs are awesome C developers. I work primarily on Windows while they work mostly on Linux. So in essence they hired a Delphi developer to work in a language he doesn’t know on a platform he havent used.
They simply took for granted that I worked in C/C++, while I took for granted that they used object pascal. Its an easy mistake to make and its not the first time; and probably not the last.
Needless to say the learning curve would be extremely high for any developer (learning a new operating-system and programming language at the same time as you are supposed to be productive).
When my girlfriend suddenly faced a life threatening illness the situation became worse. It was impossible for me to commute or leave her side for the unforeseeable future; so when you add the six months learning curve to this situation; six months of not being able to contribute on the level I am used to; well I am old enough to know how that ends. So I did what was best for everyone and resigned.
Besides, I am a damn good Delphi developer with standing invitation to many companies; so it made more sense to just take a step backwards. Which was not fun because I really enjoyed the short time I was there. But, it was not meant to be.
And that is basically all there is to it.
Ok. But if Smart is a development tool, will it support Friend-OS ?
This is something that I really want to do. But since The Smart Company is a proper company with stocks, shareholders and investors – it’s not a decision I can take on my own. It is something that must be debated by the board. But personally yeah, I would love that.
As they grow, so does the need for proper development tools
One of the reasons I hope FriendOS succeeds is because it’s a win-win situation. The more they expand the more relevant Smart becomes. Say what you will about JavaScript but writing large and complex applications is not easy by any measure.
So the moment we introduce Smart Pascal for Friend, their users will be able to write large applications rapidly, with better time-to-market and consequent ROI. So it’s a win-win. If they succeed then we get a bigger market; If they don’t we havent lost anything.
This may sound extremely self-serving, but Friend-Labs have had the same chance as everyone else to invest in Smart; our investor plans have been available for quite some time, and we have to do what is best for our company.
But what about Amibian, was it just a short thing?
Not at all. It is put on hold for a few months while we release the next generation RTL. Which is probably the biggest update in the history of Smart Pascal. We have a very clear agenda ahead of us and Amibian.js is (as underlined) a very small part of what we do.
But Amibian is written using our next generation RTL, and without that our customers cant really do much with it. So it’s important to get the RTL out first and then work on the IDE to reflect its many new features. After that – Amibian.js development will continue.
The primary target for Amibian.js is embedded devices and kiosk systems, coupled with full-screen web applications and hardware front-ends (NAS and backup devices being great examples). So the desktop will run on affordable, off the shelves hardware starting at $40 and all the way up to the most powerful and expensive x86 boards on the market. Cheap solutions like Raspberry PI, ODroid XU4 and Tinkerboard will deliver what you today need a dedicated $120 x86 board to achieve.
Our desktop will run on many targets and is platform independent by design
This means that our deskop has a wildly different modus operandi. We will not require a constant connection to a remote server. Amibian will happily boot up on a single device, regardless of processor type.
Had we coded our backend using Delphi or C++ builder (native like FriendOS have done) we would have been finished months ago. And I could have caught up with FriendOS in a couple of months if I wanted to. But that is not in our agenda. We have written our server framework for node.js as we coded the desktop – which means it’s platform and OS agnostic by design. If node.js runs, Amibian will run. It wont care if you are running on a $40 embedded board or the latest Intel i9 cpu.
Last words
I really hope this has helped and that the confusion between Amibian.js and our agenda, versus what Friend-Labs is doing, is now clearer.
From Norway with love
I wish Friend-Labs the very best and hope they are successful in their endeavour. They have worked very hard on the product and deserve that. And while I might come over as arrogant at times, im really not.
Web desktops have been around for a long time now (Asustor is my favorite) through Delphi and C++ builder and that is just facts. But that doesn’t mean you can’t put things together in new and interesting ways! Smart itself was first put together by existing technology. It was said to be impossible by many because JavaScript and object pascal are unthinkable companions. But it turned out to be a perfect match.
As for the future – personally I don’t believe in the web-desktop outside a specific context, something to give it purpose if you like. I believe for instance that Amibian.js will be awesome for Amiga users when its running on a $99 ARM laptop. Where the system boots straight into a full-screen desktop and where UAE.js is fully integrated into the core, making retro-gaming and running old programs close to seamless. That I can believe in.
But it would make no sense running Amibian or FriendOS in a browser on top of a Windows desktop or a full Ubuntu X session. Unless the virtual desktop functions as your corporate window with access to company mail, documents and essentially what every web-based intranet already does. So once again we end up with the fact that this has already been done. And unless you create a unique context for it, it just wont have any appeal. This is also why I havent pursued the same tech Friend-Labs have, because that’s not where the exciting stuff is happening.
But I will happily be proven wrong, because that means an even bigger market for us should we decide to support the platform.
Smart-Pascal: A brave new world, 2022 is here
Trying to explain what Smart Mobile Studio does and the impact it can have on your development cycle is very hard. The market is rampant with superficial frameworks that promises you the world, and investors have been taken for a ride by hyped up, one-click “app makers” more than once.
I can imagine that being an investor is a bit like panning for gold. Things that glitter the most often turn out to be worthless – yet fortunes may hide beneath unpolished and rugged surfaces.
Software will disrupt most traditional industries in the next 5-10 years.
Uber is just a software tool, they don’t own any cars, yet they are now the
biggest taxi company in the world. -Source: R.M.Goldman, Ph.d
So I had enough. Instead of trying to tell people what I can do, I decided I’m going to show them instead. As the american’s say: “talk is cheap”. And a working demonstration is worth a thousand words.
Care to back that up with something?
A couple of weeks ago I published a video on YouTube of our Smart Pascal based desktop booting up in VMWare. The Amiga forums went off the chart!
For those that havent followed my blog or know nothing about the desktop I’m talking about, here is a short summary of the events so far:
Smart Mobile Studio is a compiler that takes pascal, like that made popular in Delphi or Lazarus, and compiles it JavaScript instead of machine-code.
This product has shipped with an example of a desktop for years (called “Quartex media desktop”). It was intended as an example of how you could write a front-end for kiosk machines and embedded devices. Systems that could use a touch screen as the interface between customer and software.
You have probably seen those info booths in museums, universities and libraries? Or the ticket machines in subways, train-stations or even your local car-wash? All of those are embedded systems. And up until recently these have been small and expensive computers for running Windows applications in full-screen. Applications which in turn talk to a server or local database.
Smart Mobile Studio is able to deliver the exact same (and more) for a fraction of the price. A company in Oslo replaced their $300 per-board unit – with off the shelves $35 Raspberry Pi mini-computers. They then used Smart Pascal to write their client software and ran it in a fullscreen-browser. The Linux distribution was changed to boot straight into Firefox in full-screen. No Linux desktop, just a web display.
The result? They were able to cut production cost by $265 per unit.
Right, back to the desktop. I mentioned the Amiga community. This is a community of coders and gamers that grew up with the old Commodore machines back in the 80s and 90s. A new Amiga is now on the way (just took 20+ years) – and the look and feel of the new operating-system, Amiga OS 4.1, is the look and feel I have used in The Smart Desktop environment. First of all because I grew up on these machines myself, and secondly because the architecture of that system was extremely cost-effective. We are talking about a system that delivered pre-emptive multitasking in as little as 512Kb of memory (!). So this is my “ode to OS 4” if you will.
And the desktop has caused quite a stir both in the Delphi community, cloud community and retro community alike. Why? Because it shows some of the potential cloud technology can give you. Potential that has been under their nose all this time.
And even more important: it demonstrate how productive you can be in Smart Pascal. The operating system itself, both visual and non-visual parts, was put together in my spare time over 3 weeks. Had I been able to work on it daily (as a normal job) I would have knocked it out in a week.
A desktop as a project type
All programming languages have project types. If you open up Delphi and click “new” you are greeted with a rich menu of different projects you can make. From low-level DLL files to desktop applications or database servers. Delphi has it all.
Delphi offers a wide range of projects types you can create
The same is true for visual studio. You click “new solution” and can pick from a wide range of different projects. Web projects, servers, desktop applications and services.
Smart Pascal is the only system where you click “new project” and there is a type called “Smart desktop” and “Smart desktop application”. In other words, the power to create a full desktop is now an integrated part of Smart Pascal.
And the desktop is unique to you. You get to shape it, brand it and make it your own!
Let us take a practical example
Imagine a developer given the task to move the company’s aging invoice and credit system from the Windows desktop – to a purely web-based environment.
The application itself is large and complex, littered with legacy code and “quick fixes” going back decades. Updating such a project is itself a monumental task – but having to first implement concepts like what a window is, tasks, user space, cloud storage, security endpoints, look and feel, back-end services and database connectivity; all of that before you even begin porting the invoice system itself ? The cost is astronomical.
And it happens every single day!
In Smart Pascal, the same developer would begin by clicking “new project” and selecting “Smart desktop”. This gives him a complete desktop environment that is unique to his project and company.
A desktop that he or she can shape, adjust, alter and adapt according to the need of his employer. Things like file-type recognition, storage, getting that database – all of these things are taken care of already. The developer can focus on his task, namely to deliver a modern implementation of their invoice and credit software – not waste months trying to force JavaScript frameworks do things they simply lack the depth to deliver.
Once the desktop has the look and feel in order, he would have to make a simple choice:
- Should the whole desktop represent the invoice system or ..
- Should the invoice system be implemented as a secondary application running on the desktop?
If it’s a large and dedicated system where the users have no need for other programs running, then implementing the invoice system inside the desktop itself is the way to go.
If however the customer would like to expand the system later, perhaps add team management, third-party web-services or open-office like productivity (a unified intranet if you like) – then the second option makes more sense.
On the brink of a revolution
The developer of 2022 is not limited to the desktop. He is not restricted to a particular operating system or chip-set. Fact is, cloud has already reduced these to a matter of preference. There is no strategic advantage of using Windows over Linux when it comes to cloud software.
Where a traditional developer write and implement a solution for a particular system (for instance Microsoft Windows, Apple OS X or Linux) – cloud developers deliver whole eco systems; constellations of software constructed from many parts, both micro-services developed in-house but also services from others; like Amazon or Azure.
All these parts co-operate and can be combined through established end-point standards, much like how components are used in Delphi or Visual Studio today.
The Smart Desktop, codename “Amibian.js”
Access to products written in Smart is through the browser, or sometimes through a “paper thin” native host (Cordova Phonegap, Delphi and C/C++) that expose system level functionality. These hosts wrap your application in a native, executable container ready for Appstore or Google Play.
Now the visual content is typically the same, and is only adapted for a particular device. The real work is divided between the client (which is now very much capable) and your server back-end.
So people still write code in 2022, but the software behaves differently and is designed to function as a group (cluster). And this requires a shift in the way we think.
Above: One of my asm.js prototype compilers. Lets just say it runs fast!
Scaling a solution from processing 100 invoices a minute to handling 100.000 invoices a minute – is no longer a matter of code, but of architecture. This is where the traditional, native only approach to software comes up short, while more flexible approaches like node.js is infinitely more capable.
What has emerged up until now is just the tip of the ice-berg.
Over the next five to eight years, everything is going to change. And the changes will be irrevocable and permanent.
The Smart Desktop back-end running as a system service on a Raspberry PI
As the Americans say, talk is cheap – and I’m done talking. I will do this with you, or without you. Either way it’s happening.
Nightly-build of the desktop can be tested here: http://quartexhq.myasustor.com/
Amibian.js and the Narcissus hack
Wow, I must admit that I never really thought Amibian.js would become even remotely as popular as it has – yet people respond with incredible enthusiasm to our endeavour. I was just told that an article at Commodore USA mentioned us – that an exposure to 37000 readers. Add that to the roughly 40.000 people that subscribe to my feeds around the world and I must say: I hope I code something worthy of your time!
This is going to look and behave like the bomb when im done!
But there is a lot of stuff on the list before it’s even remotely finished. This is due to the fact that im not just juggling one codebase here – im juggling 5 separate yet interconnected codebases at the same time (!). First there is the Smart Mobile Studio RTL (run time library) which represents the foundation. This gives me object-oriented, fully inheritance driven visual controls. This have roughly 5 years of work behind it.
Still #1 after all these years
On top of that you have the actual visual controls, like buttons, scrollbars, lists, css3 effect engines, tweening, database storage and a ton of low-level stuff. The browser have no idea what a window is for example, let alone how it should look or respond to users. So every little piece has to be coded by someone. And well, that’s what I do.
Next you have the workbench and operating-system itself. What you know as Amibian.js, Smart Workbench or Quartex media desktop – take your pick, but it’s already a substantial codebase spanning some 40 units with thousands of lines of code. It is divided into two parts: the web front-end that you have all seen; and the node.js backend that is not yet made public.
And on top of that you have the external stuff. Quake III didn’t spontaneously self-assemble inside the desktop, someone had to do some coding and make the two interface. Same with all the other features you have.
The worst so far (as in damn hard to get right) is the Ace text editor. Ace by itself is super easy to work with – but you may have noticed that we have removed it’s scrollbars and replaced these with Amiga scrollbars instead? That is a formidable challenge it its own right.
Aced it! Kidnapping signals was a challenge
Whats on the menu this weekend?
I noticed that on Linux that text-selection was utterly messed up, so when you moved a window around – it would suddenly start selecting the title text of other elements around the desktop. This is actually a bug in the browser – not my code; but I still have to code around it. Which I have now done.
I also solved selection for the console window (or any “text” container. A window is made up of many parts and the content region can be inherited from and replaced), so that should now work fine regardless of browser and platforms. Ace theming also works, and the vertical scrollbar is responding as expected. Still need a few tweaks to move right, but that is easy stuff. The hard part is behind us thankfully.
Selection – works
Right now I’m working on ScummVM so that should be in place later today 🙂
Thats cool, but what motivates you?
Cult of Joy
Retro gaming is important, and we have to make it as easy for people to enjoy their retro gear without patent trolls ruining the fun. Im just so tired of how ruined the Amiga scene is by these (3 companies in particular).. thieves is the only word I can find that fits.
So fine! I will make my own. Come hell or high water. Free as a bird and untouchable.
So I have made some tools that will make it ridiculously easy for you to share, download and play your games online. Whenever you want, hosted where-ever you need and there is not a god damn thing people can do about it. When you realize how simple the hack is it will make you laugh. I came up with this ages ago and dubbed it Narcissus.
To understand the Narcissus hack, consider the following:
PNG is a lossless compression format, meaning that it doesn’t lose any information when compressed. It’s not like JPEG which scrambles the original and saves a faximile that tricks the eye. Nope, if you compress a PNG image you get the exact same out when you decode it (read: show it).
But who said we have to store pixels? Pixels are just bytes after all. In fact, why can’t we take a whole game disk or rom and store that inside a picture? Sure you can!
This tool is now built into Amibian.js
It’s amusing, I came up with this hack years ago. It has been a part of Smart Mobile Studio since the beginning.
You have to remember that retro games are super small compared to modern games. The average ADF file is what? 880kb or something like that? Well hold on to your hat buddy, because PNG can hold 64 megabyte of data! You can encode a decent Amiga hard disk image in 64 megabyte.
Can you guess what the picture on the right contains? This picture is actually ALL the Amiga rom files packed into a single image. Dont worry, I converted it to JPEG to mess up the data before uploading. But yes, you can now host not just the games as normal picture files, but also roms and whatever you like.
And the beauty of it – who the hell is going to find them? You can host them on Github, Google drive, Dropbox or right your blog — if you don’t have the encryption key the file is useless.
Snap, crackle and pop!
RSS Filesystem
You know RSS feeds right? If you sign up for a blog you automatically get a RSS feed. It’s basically just a list of your recent posts – perhaps with an extract from each article, a thumbnail picture and links to each post. RSS have been around for a decade or more. It’s a great way to keep track of news.
The second hack is that using the data-to-image-encoder you can store a whole read-only filesystem as a normal RSS feed. Always think outside the box!
Let’s say you have a game collection for your Amiga right? Lets say 200 games. Wouldnt it be nice to have all those games online? Just readily available regardless of where you may be? Without “you know who” sending you a nasty email?
Well, just encode your game as described above, include the data-picture in your WordPress post, and do that for each of your games. Since you can encrypt these images they will be worthless to others. But for you its a neat way of hosting all your games online for free (like WordPress or Blogger) and play them via Amibian or the patched UAE4Arm (ops, did I share that, sorry dirk *grin*) and you’re home free.
You know what’s really cool? For this part Amibian doesnt even need a server. So you can just save the Amibian.js html page on your phone and that’s all you need.
Drink up me hearties yo ho!
Smart Puppy: Smart pascal meets linux!
One of my absolute favorite operating-systems in the whole world has to be Puppy Linux. I discovered it just a few days ago and I have fallen completely in love with this thing. I can vaguely remember giving it a testdrive a few years back, but I didn’t know much about Linux in general so I didn’t understand what I it represented.
So if you are looking for a friendly, small, fast and easy to use Linux system – then Puppy is about as friendly as it gets. The Facebook user group with the same name is a warm and friendly place to be. Much like Delphi developer the Admin(s) take pride in keeping things orderly – and people who hang out there engage, care and help each other out.
Before you run out and download Puppy, which I hope you do later – please understand that Puppy is very different from Linux in general. You could almost say that it’s a whole alternative to mainstream Linux as we know it.
But, once you know about the differences then you are in for a treat! I will explain them in the article, so please be patient and take the time to digest.
Puppies hate fluff
One of the reasons I never converted wholesale to Linux (and yes I did try) – is that the average Linux distro is unbearable and unnecessary cryptic. For some reason Linux architects suffer from a terrible affliction, namely a shortage of characters. This sickness means that Linux don’t have enough characters for everyone, so programmers must use a maximum of five letters when naming their software. If coders ignore this shortage and blatantly name something directly or intuitively – then Richard Stallman and Lady Gaga will order a “drive-by pony tail cut” on the dude. And a Linux administrator without his pont-tail is finished (the nerd equivalent of flipping burgers at McDonalds).
Puppy Linux does contain it’s fair share of the classical Linux software (that goes without saying). But, the man behind this wonderful Linux flavour is also a level-headed, clever and resourceful man (or woman) – so he has thankfully broken with what can only be described as archaic thinking.
Puppy Linux is not exactly software impaired
So even with my minimal Linux experience I was able to navigate around the filesystem, locate documents (which here is called “Documents” and “My Documents” even). There is a whole bunch of these tiny differences, small things that makes all the difference. From the way he (or she) has named things – to where things are stored and placed.
And it’s so small! The basic install is less than 300 megabytes in size (!) Yes you read that right. The generic Puppy Linux installation with desktop and a few popular applications is less than 300 megabytes.
In my case I can have a fully loaded development studio, featuring GCC, FPC (freepascal), Lazarus IDE, CodeBlocks IDE, KDevelop IDE, Anjunta developer studio – and last but never least Smart Mobile Studio on a 2 gigabyte USB stick (!) I don’t think you can even get USB sticks that small any more (?) The smallest I got is 32 gigabyte and the largest is 256 gigabyte.
But before we go on with the wonders of Puppy Linux – lets look at what Linux did wrong. Why is Linux even to this day considered hard to use? Or to put it another way: what has Windows and OS X done right to be considered easier to use yet capable of the same (and often more) ?
Naming, what Linux did wrong
One of the tenants of professional programming, is to ensure that classes, members and functions have meaningful names. There was a time when you would get away with single character class, variable and method names — but that wont fly in 2017. Your Q&A department would have you for breakfast if you checked in code like that. Classes, name-spacing and packages should be descriptive. End of story.
The reason this has become an almost sacred law, should be obvious: it may not be you that maintains the software 5, 10 or 15 years down the road. A piece of code should always be written in such a way that it can be understood and thus maintained by others within a reasonable time-frame (which also means plenty of comments and good documentation). This is not a matter of preference, but of time and money. And when you pay out salaries these factors are one and the same.
So naming elements of software in 2017 has a lot of criteria attached to it. The most obvious so far being:
- Always name things clearly because that
- ensures ease of use
- simplifies maintenance
- removes doubt as to “what is what”
- less user-mistakes
- The less mistakes, either in understanding something or using something, the less money a business throws out the window. Money that could be spent paying you to make something cool instead (or fix bugs that are critical).
- The less user-mistakes caused by customers, the more your service department can focus on quality of service. When a company starts it usually have outstanding support, but as it grows their service-desk slowly become robots.
- The easier and more intuitive a system is, the more users it will attract. If people can pick something up and just naturally figure out how things work, then statistics show that they most likely will continue using it through thick and thin.
Right. With these rules in mind – what happens if you take them but apply them to Linux instead? Not Linux code or libraries or stuff like that, but Linux the user-experience from top to bottom?
And don’t get me wrong, I think Linux is awesome so this is not an attack on Linux; I’m simply pointing out factors that could help make Linux even better.
I mean, just look at the Linux filesystem. Again you have this absurd shortage of characters. Why would anyone abbreviate the word “user[s]” into “usr” ? It make noh sense. Same with “lib”, would it have killed you to call it “libraries”? And so it continues with “dev” – because calling it “devices” would cause the space-time-continuum to break.
Shell shocked
The shell (or command-line under Windows) and it’s commands is really the thing that annoys me the most. There is a fine line between use and abuse, and the level of abbreviation here is beyond whimsical and harmless – and well into the realm of silly and absurd
Who in their right mind would name a command “ps”? What could it possibly mean? The first thing that comes to mind is “print spool”. If you come from any other platform than Linux (and perhaps Unix, I don’t know) you would never imagine that “ps” actually means “list all running processes and their states”.
“ps” lists the running processes and their states
Above: running “ps” from the shell lists the running processes. Would it have killed the coders to just call it, oh perhaps, “listprocesses” or “showrunningprograms”?
The “ps” command is just one in a long, long list of commands that really should be brought into the twenty-first century. The benefits should be obvious. It should not be necessary for a 43-year-old man to blog about this, because it’s been a problem for the better part of three decades.
- Kids and teenagers is the bread and butter for all operating systems. The faster a kid of teenager can do something with a system, the more loyal that individual will be to the platform in the future.
- Linux needs developers and users from other platforms. When someone who has been a successful developer for almost 30 years find a system cryptic and hard to use, how much harder will it be for a non-technical user?
- Standards are important. The location of files, libraries and settings should be uniform. As of writing Linux seem to have 3 different standards (again, I am no expert): systemd, initd and “systemx”. The latter is just a name I made up, because no-one really knows what it’s called. We are now in the realm of PlayStation, ChromeOS, WebOS and systems that build on the Linux – but deviate the moment the drivers have loaded.
Again, I’m not writing this in a negative mindset. I have been using Ubuntu for a while as an alternative to Windows and OS X. But this has been a purely user-centric experience. I have not done any programming except random bits of Freepascal and node.js experiements. I have enjoyed Ubuntu purely as a user. Writing documents, checking email, browsing the web, IRC, reading news groups – ordinary stuff.
So I am very positive to Linux, but I have yet to find “my” flavour of it. A Linux distro I feel at home with and that appeals to my way of working.
Until today that is..
Enter puppy Linux
Puppy is a flavour of Linux that just demolishes some of Linux’s most holiest of concepts. Everyone will tell you never to run as root, always have the root account in peace – and keep it under lock and key just in case someone gets into your second account right?
Well not Puppy. Here you are expected to run as root and you can, if you for some reason must, jump out into a secondary user which is fake. So indeed – puppy Linux is a single user Linux system. It’s the rebel, the scoundrel and rouge of the Linux world – the distro that couldn’t care less what the other guys are doing.
Fancy a spot of coding? GCC is a SFS module away ..
Secondly, and this is very cool, Puppy is highly modular. No I’m not talking about packages, all Linux distros have that in some form or another. No I’m talking about something called SFS files, short for squashed file-system.
To make a long story short, Puppy allows you to mount compressed files as disks and they become a part of the system. It’s a bit like the virtual-drive API on windows (if you have ever coded against that?). You may have noticed in Windows how you can double-click on a .ISO file and suddenly the file is mounted in the file-explorer and stays mounted until you manually dis-mount the damn thing?
Well, SFS is that but also much more. Because when you mount the SFS file whatever applications it contains registers on the start-menu, adds itself to the global path and essentially becomes one with the whole system. This took me a while to wrap my head around this (good features always comes with a price, so i keept waiting for the negative. But there were none!). The people I talked to about this were not coders, so they had some very colorful explanations to how it all worked. But once I realized SFS was just a zip-file (or tarball or whatever) with a fixed structure (including mount script and dis-mount script) I got the picture.
Size and speed matters
Before I started using a PC back in the early 90’s I was a huge Amiga fan. I still am (as you no doubt have noticed). One of the first things I found, or first difference between Amiga computing and PC computing that hit me – was how wasteful PC’s were. I remember I was shocked when I saw how much space and cpu power the average programmer just wasted — because on the Amiga everyone strived to be as resourceful and efficient as possible.
We would spend days optimizing even the smallest parts of our applications just to ensure that it ran at top speed and produced as little bloat as possible. This was just baked into us, it was the way of the force and as common as your grandfather’s work ethics. Quality and achievement went hand in hand.
CodeBlocks is an excellent IDE 🙂
When you fire up Puppy Linux you are instantly reminded that there are people to this day that cares about size and speed. And that maybe, just maybe, consumerism has tricked you into throwing away perfectly usable technology year after year. Machines that actually had more than enough CPU power for the tasks you wanted, but was slowed down by bloated operating-systems, poor programming and lazy code generators.
Puppy Linux is the fastest bloody Linux you will ever run. The only operatingsystem I have tried that runs faster, is Aros compiled for Arm (a distro called Aeros, a reverse engineered edition of Amiga OS). But as far as x86 and the Linux kernel goes — Puppy Linux is the bomb.
I know I’m repeating myself here but: less than 300 megabytes for a fully loaded Linux distro with text processor, browser, devkit, music player, video player and all the “typical” applications you would use for daily tasks? And it truly is the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy without question.
Amiga coders and the cult of joy
When I started to snoop around the Puppy environment and community, I started to notice a couple of “tell-tell” signs. Tiny, subtle things that only an Amiga coder would pick up on. Enough to give you a hunch, a gut feeling – but not enough to blatantly say it out loud. “Amiga guys did this” i would whisper to myself. And it’s not really such a big surprise to find that coders now in their 40s that used to be Amiga coders.
In 30 years time there will be company owners and CEO’s that grew up with Playstation and have fond memories of that. But they wont recognize each-other by their craftmanship – that is the difference.
The cult of joy lives on, albeit in new forms
The Amiga was special because it was not just a games machine. It was also a complete rewrite of what constituted the power operatingsystem of its time: Unix. In other words they copied the best stuff from Unix (which by the way had the same absurd filesystem as Linux still has) but cleaned it up. First thing to be cleaned was (drumroll) the filesystem. But that’s another story all together.
When I entered the Puppy Linux forum I naturally mentioned that I was a complete total Linux novice, and that my favorite machine before x86 was an Amiga. And what do you think happened? Let’s just say that more than a few greeted me with open arms. These were the Amiga users that went to Linux when Commodore went under all those years ago. And they had been active in shaping Linux ever since (!)
So yeah, had a great time on their forums – and it was like running into your long-lost cousin or something. Like if you havent seen a family member in 30 years and suddenly you meet them face to face.
Tired of 30 gigabyte operatingsystems?
Puppy Linux is not for everyone. It’s the kind of system you either love or hate. I have yet to find someone on a middle-ground regarding puppy. Either you love it, or you hate it. Or if you prefer: either you use it and are thrilled about it, or you never install it.
It has a lot of good things going for it:
- It is built to be one of the smallest, working desktop environment you can get
- It is built according to “the old ways”, where speed, efficiency and size matter
- It runs fine on older hardware (my test machine is an 8 year old laptop) and makes stuff you would otherwise throw away become valuable again.
- It is storage abstracted, meaning you can have all your personal stuff inside a single SFS archive (easier to back up), while the operatingsystem remains on a USB stick.
- You don’t have to permanently install it (again, boot from a USB stick).
- It is single user by default, which is perfect for IOT projects and devices!
- It supports ARM, so you can now enjoy this awesome thing on Raspberry PI 3 !
- Its Linux so it has all the benefits of a rich driver database
- Latest Puppy is binary compatible with Ubuntu (whatever that means)
- There are 3 different desktops for it (to my knowledge), so if you don’t like the default client just install something else
- It is the perfect rescue USB stick. At less than 300 Mb you can fit it on any old USB stick you have around the house. I think the smallest you can buy now is 4 GB
- It has a warm, helpful, friendly and international group of users
Oh and it’s free!
As a final note: I installed Wine, the system that makes it possible to run Windows software on Linux (not an emulator, more of a api-call middle-ware /slash/ dispatcher). I was quite surprised to see it run Smart Mobile Studio on the first try!
So fancy a bit of hacking this weekend? Why not give puppy a go?
Check it out here: http://puppylinux.org/main/Download%20Latest%20Release.htm
Smart Pascal + WebOS = true
If you own a television (and who doesn’t) chances are you own an LG model. The LG brand has been on the market since before recorded history (or so it feels) and have been a major player for decades.
What is little known though, is that LG also owns and finance a unique operating system. This is not uncommon these days, most NAS and cloud vendors have their own system (there are roughly 20 cloud based systems on the market that I know of). The only way to make a Smart TV (sigh) is to add a computer to it. And if you buy a television today chances are it contains a small embedded board running some custom-made operating system designed to do just that.
Every vendor has their own system, and those that don’t usually end up forking Android and adapt that to their needs.
Luna WebOS
LG’s system is called WebOS. This may sound like yet another html eye candy front end, but hear me out because this OS is not what it seems.
Except for some font issues (see disk label) Smart loaded fine under WebOS
Remember Palm OS? If you are between 35 and 45 you should remember that before Apple utterly demolished the mobile-phone market with their iPhone, one of the most popular brands was Palm. Their core product being “Palm Pilot”, a kind of digital filo-fax (personal organizer) and mobile phone rolled into one.
WebOS is based on what used to be called Palm-OS, but it has been completely revamped, given a sexy new user interface (looks a lot like android to be honest!) and brought into the present age. And best of all: its 100% free! It runs on a plethora of systems, from x86 to Raspberry PI to Mips. It is used in televisions, terminals and set-top-boxes around the world – and is quite popular amongst engineers.
Check it out their new portal here; there is also plenty of links to pre-built images if you look around there: https://pivotce.com/
JavaScript application stack
One of the coolest features in my view, is that their applications are primarily made by JavaScript. The OS itself is native of course, but they have discovered that JavaScript and HTML5 is an excellent way to build applications. Applications that is easy to control, sandboxed and safe yet incredibly powerful and capable.
Smart Desktop booting Quake 3 in Luna OS
Well, today I sent them an Email requesting their SDK. I know they use Enyo.js as their primary and suggested framework – but that is no problem for Smart Mobile Studio. A better question is: can Luna handle our codebase?
When I loaded up Quake 3 in pure Asm.JS the TV crashed with a spectacular access violation. So they are probably not used to the level of hardcore coding Smart developers represent. But yeah, Quake III is about as advanced as it gets – and it pushes any browser to the outer limits of what is possible.
Once I get the SDK, docs and a few examples – I will begin adding support for it as quickly as possible. Which means you get a new project type especially for the platform + API units (typically stored under $RTL\Apis folder).
Why is this cool?
Because with support for Luna / WebOS, you as a Delphi or Smart developer can offer your services to companies that use WebOS or Luna (the open source version) in their devices. The list of companies is substantial – and they are well established companies. And as you have no doubt noticed, hardware engineers doesn’t always make the best software engineers. So this opens up plenty of opportunities for a good object pascal / Smart developer.
Luna has an Android like quality over it – except its more smooth to use
Remember – other developers will use vanilla JavaScript. You have the onslaught of the VJL and the might of our libraries at your disposal. You can produce in days what others use weeks on achieving.
These are exciting days! I’ll keep you posted on our progress!
Smart Pascal, the next generation
I want to take the time to talk a bit about the future, because like all production companies we are all working towards lesser and greater goals. If you don’t have a goal then you are in trouble; Thankfully our goals have been very clear from the beginning. Although I must admit that our way there has been.. “colorful” at times.
When we started back in 2010 we didn’t really know what would become of our plans. We only knew that this was important; there was a sense of urgency and “we have to build this” in the air; I think everyone involved felt that this was the case, without any rational explanation as to why. Like all products of passion it can consume you in a way – and you work day and night on turning an idea into something real. From the intangible to the tangible.
It seems like yesterday, but it was 5 years ago!
By the end of 2011 / early 2012, Eric and myself had pretty much proven that this could be done. At the time there were more than enough nay-sayers and I think both of us got flamed quite often for daring to think different. People would scoff at me and say I was insane to even contemplate that object pascal could ever be implemented for something as insignificant and mediocre as JavaScript. This was my first meeting with a sub-culture of the Delphi and C++ community, a constellation I have gone head-to-head with on many occasions. But they have never managed to shake my resolve as much as inch.
When we released version 1.0 in 2012 some ideas about what could be possible started to form. Jørn defined plans for a system we later dubbed “Smart net”. In essence it would be something you logged onto from the IDE – allowing you to store your projects in the cloud, compile in the cloud (connected with Adobe build services) and essentially move parts of your eco-system to the cloud. Keep in mind this was when people still associated cloud with “storage”; they had not yet seen things like Uber or Netflix or played Quake 3 at 160 frames per second, courtesy of asm.js in their browser.
The second part would be a website where you could do the same, including a live editor, access to the compiler and also the ability to buy and sell components, solutions and products. But for that we needed a desktop environment (which is where the Quartex Media Desktop came in later).
The first version of the Media Desktop, small but powerful. Here running in touch-screen mode with classical mobile device layout (full screen forms).
Well, we have hit many bumps along the road since then. But I must be honest and say, some of our detours have also been the most valuable. Had it not been for the often absurd (to the person looking in) research and demo escapades I did, the RTL wouldn’t be half as powerful as it is today. It would deliver the basics, perhaps piggyback on Ext.js or some lame, run of the mill framework – and that would be that. Boring, flat and limited.
What we really wanted to deliver was a platform. Not just a website, but a rich environment for creating, delivering and enjoying web and cloud based applications. And without much fanfare – that is ultimately what the Smart Desktop and it’s sexy node.js back-end is all about is all about.
We have many project types in the pipeline, but the Smart Desktop type is by far the most interesting and powerful. And its 100% under your control. You can create both the desktop itself as a project – and also applications that should run on that desktop as separate projects.
This is perfectly suited for NAS design (network active storage devices can usually be accessed through a web portal on the device), embedded boards, intranets and even intranets for that matter.
You get to enjoy all the perks of a multi-user desktop, one capable of both remote desktop access, telnet access, sharing files and media, playing music and video (we even compiled the mp4 codec from C to JavaScript so you can play mp4 movies without the need for a server backend).
The Smart Desktop
The Smart Desktop project is not just for fun and games. We have big plans for it. And once its solid and complete (we are closing in on 46% done), my next side project will not be more emulators or demos – it will be to move our compiler(s) to Amazon, and write the IDE itself from scratch in Smart Pascal.
The Smart Desktop – A full desktop in the true sense of the word
And yeah, we have plans for EmScripten as well – which takes C/C++ and compiles it into asm.js. It will take a herculean effort to merge our RTL with their sandboxed infrastructure – but the benefits are too great to ignore.
As a bonus you get to run native 68k applications (read: Amiga applications) via emulation. While I realize this will be mostly interesting for people that grew up with that machine – it is still a testament to the power of Smart and how much you can do if you really put your mind to it.
Naturally, the native IDE wont vanish. We have a few new directions we are investigating here – but native will absolutely not go anywhere. But cloud, the desktop system we are creating, is starting to become what we set out to make five years ago (has it been half a decade already? Tempus fugit!). As you all know it was initially designed as an example of how you could write full-screen applications for Raspberry PI and similar embedded devices. But now its a full platform in its own right – with a Linux core and node.js heart, there really is very little you cannot do here.
The Smart Pascal compiler is one of our tools that is ready for cloud-i-fication
Being able to login to the Smart company servers, fire up the IDE and just code – no matter if you are: be it Spain, Italy, Egypt, China or good old USA — is a pretty awesome thing!
Clicking compile and the server does the grunt work and you can test your apps live in a virtual window; switch between device layouts and targets — then hit “publish” and it goes to Cordova (or Delphi) and voila – you get a message back when binaries for 9 mobile devices is ready for deployment. One click to publish your applications on Appstore, Google play and Microsoft marketplace.
Object pascal works
People may have brushed off object pascal (and from experience those people have a very narrow view of what object pascal is all about), but when they see what Smart delivers, which in itself is written in Delphi, powered by Delphi and should be in every Delphi developer’s toolbox — i think it should draw attention to both Delphi as a product, object pascal as a language – and smart as a solution.
With Smart it doesn’t matter what computer you use. You can sit at home with the new A1222 PPC Amiga, or a kick-ass Intel i7 beast that chew virtual machines for breakfast. If your computer can handle a modern website, then you can learn object pascal and work directly in the cloud.
The Smart Desktop running on cheap embedded hardware. The results are fantastic and the financial savings of using Smart Pascal on the kiosk client is $400 per unit in this case
Heck you can work off a $60 ODroid XU4, it has more than enough horsepower to drive the latest chrome or Firefox engines. All the compilation takes place on the server anyways. And if you want a Delphi vessel rather than phonegap (so that it’s a Delphi application that opens up a web-view in full-screen and expose features to your smart code) then you will be happy to know that this is being investigated.
More targets
There are a lot of systems out there in the world, some of which did not exist just a couple of years ago. FriendOS is a cloud based operating system we really want to support, so we are eager to get cracking on their SDK when that comes out. Being able to target FriendOS from Smart is valuable, because some of the stuff you can do in SMS with just a bit of code – would take weeks to hand write in JavaScript. So you get a productive edge unlike anything else – which is good to have when a new market opens.
As far as Delphi is concerned there are smaller systems that Embarcadero may not be interested in, for example the many embedded systems that have come out lately. If Embarcadero tried to target them all – it would be a never-ending cat and mouse game. It seems like almost every month there is a new board on the market. So I fully understand why Embarcadero sticks to the most established vendors.
Smart technology allows you to cover all your bases regardless of device
But for you, the programmer, these smaller boards can repsent thousands of dollars worth of saving. Perhaps you are building a kiosk system and need to have a good-looking user interface that is not carved in stone, touch capabilities, low-latency full-duplex communication with a server; not much you can do about that if Delphi doesnt target it. And Delphi is a work horse so it demands a lot more cpu than a low-budget ARM SoC can deliver. But web-tech can thrive in these low-end environments. So again we see that Smart can compliment and be a valuable addition to Delphi. It helps you as a Delphi developer to act on opportunities that would otherwise pass you by.
So in the above scenario you can double down. You can use Smart for the user-interface on a low power, low-cost SoC (system on a chip) kiosk — and Delphi on the server.
It all depends on what you are interfacing with. If you have a full Delphi backend (which I presume you have) then writing the interface server in Delphi obviously makes more sense.
If you don’t have any back-end then, depending on your needs or future plans, it could be wise to investigate if node.js is right for you. If it’s not – go with what you know. You can make use of Smart’s capabilities either way to deliver cost-effective, good-looking device front-ends of mobile apps. Its valuable tool in your Delphi toolbox.
Better infrastructure and rooting
So far our support for various systems has been in the form of APIs or “wrapper units”. This is good if you are a low-level coder like myself, but if you are coming directly from Delphi without any background in web technology – you wouldn’t even know where to start.
So starting with the next IDE update each platform we support will not just have low-level wrapper units, but project types and units written and adapted by human beings. This means extra work for us – but that is the way it has to be.
As of writing the following projects can be created:
- HTML5 mobile applications
- HTML5 mobile console applications
- Node.js console applications
- node.js server applications
- node.js service applications (requires PM2)
- Web worker project (deprecated, web-workers can now be created anywhere)
We also have support for the following operating systems:
- Chrome OS
- Mozilla OS
- Samsung Tizen OS
The following API’s have shipped with Smart since version 1.2:
- Khronos browser extensions
- Firefox spesific API
- NodeWebkit
- Phonegap
- Phonegap provides native access to roughly 9 operating systems. It is however cumbersome to work with and beta-test if you are unfamiliar with the “tools of the trade” in the JavaScript world.
- Whatwg
- WAC Apis
Future goals
The first thing we need to do is to update and re-generate ALL header files (or pascal units that interface with the JavaScript libraries) and make what we already have polished, available, documented and ready for enterprise level use.
Why pay $400 to power your kiosk when $99 and Smart can do a better job?
Secondly, project types must be established where they make sense. Not all frameworks are suitable for full project isolation, but act more like utility libraries (like jQuery or similar training-wheels). And as much as possible of the RTL made platform independent and organized following our namespace scheme.
But there are also other operating systems we want to support:
- Norwegian made Friend OS, which is a business oriented cloud desktop
- Node.js OS is very exciting
- LG WebOS, and their Enyo application framework
- Asustor DLM web operating system is also a highly attractive system to support
- OpenNAS has a very powerful JavaScript application framework
- Segate Nas OS 4 likewise use JavaScript for visual, universal applications
- Microsoft Universal Platform allows you to create truly portable, native speed JavaScript applications
- QNap QTS web operating system [now at version 4.2]
All of these are separate from our own NAS and embedded device system: Smart Desktop, which uses node.js as a backend and will run on anything as long as node and a modern browser is present.
Final words
I hope you guys have enjoyed my little trip down memory lane, and also the plans we have for the future. Personally I am super excited about moving the IDE to the cloud and making Smart available 24/7 globally – so that everyone can use it to design, implement and build software for the future right now.
Smart Pascal Builder (or whatever nickname we give it) is probably the first of its kind in the world. There are a ton of “write code on the web” pages out there, but so far there is not a single hard-core development studio like I have in mind here.
So hold on, because the future is just around the corner 😉
Delphi developer on its own server
While the Facebook group will naturally continue exactly like it has these past years, we have set up a server active Delphi developers on my Quartex server.
This has a huge benefit: first of all those that want to test the Smart Desktop can do so from the same domain – and people who want to test Smart Mobile Studio can do so with myself just a PM away. Error reports etc. will still need to be sent to the standard e-mail, but now I can take a more active role in supervising the process and help clear up whatever missunderstanding could occur.
Always good with a hardcore Smart, Laz, amibian.js forum!
Besides that we are building a lively community of Delphi, Lazarus, Smart and Oxygene/Remobjects developers! Need a job? Have work you need done? Post an add — wont cost you a penny.
So why not sign up? Its free, it wont bite you and we can continue regardless of Facebook’s up-time this year..
You enter here and just fill out user/pass and that’s it: http://quartexhq.myasustor.com/sharetronix/
Smart desktop: Amibian.js past, future and present
Had someone told me 20 years ago that I would enter my 40’s enjoying JavaScript, my younger self would probably have beaten that someone over the head with a book on hardcore demo coding or something. So yeah, things have changed so much and we are right now in the middle of a paradigm shift that is taking us all to the next level – regardless if we agree or not.
Ask a person what he thinks about “cloud” and you rarely get an answer that resembles what cloud really is. Most will say “its a fancy way of dealing with storage”. Others will say its all about web-services – and others might say it’s about JavaScript.
Old coders never die, we just get better
They are all right and wrong at the same time. Cloud is first of all the total abstraction of all parts that makes up a networked computer system. Storage, processing capacity, memory, operating system, services, programming language and even instruction set.
Where a programmer today works with libraries and classes to create programs that run on a desktop — dragging visual controls like edit-boxes and buttons into place using a form or window designer; a cloud developer builds whole infrastructures. He drags and drops whole servers into place, connects external and internal services.
Storage? Ok I need Dropbox, amazon, Google drive, Microsoft one disk, local disk – and he just drags that onto a module. Done. All of these services now have a common API that allows them to talk with each other. They become like dll files or classes, all built using the same mold – but with wildly different internals. It doesn’t matter as long as they deliver the functionality according to standard.
Processing power? Setup an Azure or Amazon account and if you got the cash, you can compute enough to pre-cacalculate the human brain if you like. It has all been turned into services — that you can link together like lego pieces.
Forget everything you think you know about web; that is but the visual rendering engine over the proverbial death-star of technology hidden beneath. People have only seen the tip of the ice berg.
Operating systems have been reduced to a preference. There is no longer any reason to pick Windows over Linux on the server. Microsoft knew years ago that this day would come. Back in the late 90s I remember reading an interview with Steve Balmer doing one of his black-ops meetings with Norwegian tech holders in Oslo; and he outlined software as a service when people were on 14.4 modems. He also mentioned that “we need a language that is universal” to make this a reality. You can guess why .net was stolen from Borland, not to mention their failed hostile takover of Java (or J#) which Anders Hejlsberg was hired to spear-head.
Amibian.js
Amibian.js is my, Gunnar and Thomas‘s effort to ensure that the Amiga is made portable and can be enjoyed in this new paradigm. It is not made to compete with anyone (as was suggested earlier), but rather to make sure Amiga gets some life into her again – and that people of this generation and the kids growing up now can get to enjoy the same exciting environment that we had.
From Scandinavia with love
The world is going JavaScript. Hardware now speaks JavaScript (!), your TV now speaks JavaScript – heck your digital watch probably runs JavaScript. And just to add insult to injury – asm.js now compiles JS code side-by-side with C/C++ in terms of speed. I think the browser has seen more man years of development time than any other piece of software out there – with the exception of GCC / Gnu Linux perhaps.
Amibian is also an example of a what you can do with Smart Pascal, which is a programming environment that compiles object pascal to JavaScript. One we (The Smart Company AS) made especially for this new paradigm. I knew this was coming years ago – and have been waiting for it. But that’s another story all together.
Future
Well, naturally the desktop system is written from scratch so it needs to be completed. We are at roughly 40% right now. But there is also work to be done on UAE.js (a mild fork of sae, scriptable Amiga emulator) in terms of speed and IO. We want the emulated Amiga side to interact with the modern web desktop – to be able to load and save files to whatever backend you are using.
For those about to rock; We salute you!
Well, it’s not that easy. UAE is like an organism, and introducing new organs into an existing creature is not easily done. UAE.js (or SAE) has omitted a huge chunk of the original code – which also includes the modified boot-code that adds support for external or “virtual” UAE drives (thanks to Frode Solheim of Fs-UAE for explaining the details of the parts here).
But, there are hacker ways. The dark side is a pathway to many abilities, some deemed unnatural. So if all else fails, i will kidnap the hardfile API and delegate the IO signals to the virtual filesystem on the server — in short, UAE.JS will think it’s booting from a hardfile in memory – when in reality it will get its data from node.js.
There are some challenges here. UAE (the original) is not async but ordinary, linear C code. JavaScript is async and may not return the data on exit of the method. So i suspect I will have to cache quite a lot. Perhaps as much as 1 megabyte backwards and forwards from the file-position. But getting data in there we will (and out), come hell or high water.
We can also drop a lot of sub code, like parts of the gayle interface. I found out this is the chip that deals with the IDE interface — so it has to be there, but it can also host memory expansions – but who the hell cares in 2017 in JavaScript about that. More than enough fun via standard chip/fast/rtg memory – so the odd bits can be removed.
So we got our work cut out for us. But hey.. there can only be one .. QUARTEX! And we bring you fire.
Ok. Lets do this!
Amibian + Smart pascal = A new beginning
In the Amiga community there is a sub-group of people with an agenda. They hoard and collect every piece of hardware they can get their hand on – then sell them at absurd prices on ebay to enrich themselves. This is not only ruining the community at large, ensuring that ordinary users cannot get their hands on a plain, vanilla Amiga without having to fork out enough dough to buy a good car.
“We also have a working Facebook clone – but we’re not
going into competition with Mark Zuckerberg either”
Thankfully not everyone is like that. There are some very respected, very good people who buy old machines, restore them – and sell them at affordable prices. People that do this as a hobby or to make a little on the side. Nothing wrong with that. No, its people that try to sell you an A2000 for $3000, or that pimp out Vampire accelerator cards at 700€ a piece thats the problem.
As for the price sharks, well – this has to stop. And Gunnar’s Amibian distro has already given the Amiga scalpers a serious uppercut. Why buy an old Amiga when you can get a high-end A4000 experience with 4 times as much power for around $35? This is what Gunnar has made a reality – and he deserves a medal for his work!
And myself, Thomas and the others in our little band of brothers will pick up the fight and stand by Gunnar in his battle. A battle to make the Amiga affordable for ordinary human beings that love the platform.
Amiga as a service
Yesterday I did a little experiment. You know how Citrix and VMWare services work? In short, they are virtualization application servers. That means that they can create as many instances of Windows or Linux as they want – run your applications on it – and you can connect to your instance and use it. This is a big part of how cloud computing works.
While my little experiment is very humble, I am now streaming a WinUAE instance display from my basement server pc, just some old bucket of chips I use for debugging, directly into Amibian.js (!). It worked! I just created the world’s first Amiga application server. And it took me less than 30 minutes in Delphi !
Amibian, Amibian.js, appserver, what gives?
Let’s clear this up so you dont mix them:
Amibian. This is the original Linux distro made by Gunnar Kristjansson. It boots straight into UAE in full-screen. All it needs is a Raspberry PI, the Amiga rom files and your workbench or hard disk image. This is a purely native (machine code) solution.
Amibian.js – this is a JavaScript remake of AmigaOS that I’m building, with the look and feel of OS 4. It uses uae.js (also called SAE) to run 68k software directly in the browser. It is not a commercial product, but one of many demos that ship with Smart Mobile Studio. “Smart” is a compiler, editor and run-time library sold by The Smart Company AS. So Amibian.js is just a demo, just like Amos shipped with a ton of demo’s and Blitzbasic came with a whole disk full of examples.
Amiga application server (what I mentioned above) was just a 30 minute experiment I did yesterday after work. Again, just for fun.
I hope that clears up any confusion. Amibian.js is a purely JavaScript based desktop made in the spirit of the Amiga – it must not be confused with Amibian the Linux distro, which boots into UAE on a Raspberry PI. Nor is it an appserver – but rather, it can connect to an appserver if I want to.
Generation Amiga post on Amibian.js earlier when I added some look & feel
With a bit of work, and if everything works as expected (I don’t see why not), I will upload both source and binaries to github together with Amibian.js.
There is only one clause: It cannot be used, recreated, included or distributed by Cloanto. Sorry guys, but the ROMS belong to the people, and until you release those into public domain, you wont get access to anything we make. Nothing personal, but pimping out roms and even having audacity to fork UAE and sell it as your own? You should be ashamed of yourself.
Are you in competition with FriendOS?
This question has popped up a couple of times the past two weeks. So I want to address that head on.
I make a product called Smart Mobile Studio. I do that with a group of well-known developers, and we have done so for many years now. The preliminary ideas were presented on my blog during the winter 2009, early 2010 and we started working (and blogging) after that. Smart Mobile Studio and it’s language, Smart Pascal (see Wikipedia article), takes object pascal (like freepascal or Delphi) and compiles to JavaScript rather than machine code.
The Smart compiler is due for OS4 once i get the A1222 in my hands
One of the examples that has shipped with Smart Mobile Studio, and also been available through a library called QTX, is something called Quartex Media Desktop. Which is an example of a NAS server front-end, a kiosk front-end (ticket ordering, cash machines etc) or just an intranet desktop where you centralize media and files. It is also node.js powered to deal with the back-end filesystem. This is now called amibian.js.
In other words – it has nothing to do with Friend software labs at all. In fact, I didn’t even know Friend existed until they approached me a few weeks ago.
The Quartex Media desktop has been around for ages
Amibian.js is just an update of the Quartex Media Desktop example. It is not a commercial venture at all, but an example of how productive you can be with Smart pascal.
And it’s just one example out of more than a hundred that showcase different aspects of our run-time library. This example has been available since version 1.2 or 1.3 of Smart, so no, this is not me trying to reverse engineer FriendOS. Because I was doing this long before FriendOS even was presented. I have just added a windowing manager and made it look like OS4, which also happened before I had any contact with my buddies over at Friend Software Labs (why do you think they were interested in me).
Early 2017 Linux bootloader by Gunnar
So, am I in competition with Friend? NO! I have absolutely no ambition, aspiration or intent for anything of the sorts. And should you be in doubt then let me break it down for you:
- Hogne, Arne, David, Thomas, Francois and everyone at Friend Software Labs are friends of mine. I talk almost daily with David Pleasence who is a wonderful person and an inspiration for everyone who knows him.
- Normal people don’t sneak around stabbing friends in the back. Plain and simple. That is not how I was raised, and such behavior is completely unacceptable.
- Amibian.js is 110% pure Amiga oriented. The core of it has been a part of Smart for years now, and it has been freely available for anyone on google code and github.
- For every change we have made to the Smart RTL, the media desktop example has been updated to reflect this. But ultimately it’s just one out of countless examples. We also have a working Facebook clone – but we’re not going into competition with Mark Zuckerberg for that matter.
- People can invent the same things at the same time. Thats how reality works. There is a natural evolution of ideas, and great minds often think alike.
Why did you call it Amibian.js, it’s so confusing?
Well it’s a long story but to make it short. The first “boot into uae” thing was initially outlined by me (with the help of chips, the UAE4Arm maintainer). But I didn’t do it right because Linux has never really been my thing. So I just posted it on my retro-gaming blog and forgot all about it.
Gunnar picked this up and perfected it. He has worked weeks and months making Amibian into what it is today – together with Thomas, our spanish superhero /slash/ part-time dictator /slash/ minister of propaganda 🙂
We then started talking about making a new system. Not a new UAE, but something new and ground breaking. I proposed Smart Pascal, and we wondered how the Raspberry PI would run JavaScript performance wise. I then spent a couple of hours adding the icon layout grid and the windowing manager to our existing media desktop – and then fired up some HTML5 demos. Gunnar tested them under Chrome on the Raspberry PI — and voila, Amibian.js was born.
And that is all there is to it. No drama, no hidden agendas – and no conspiracy.
I should also add that I do not work at Friend Software Labs, but we have excellent communication and I’m sure we will combine our forces on more than one software title in the future.
On a personal note I have more than a few titles I would like to port to FriendOS. One of my best sellers of all time is an invoice and credit application – which will be re-written in Smart Pascal (its presently a mix of Delphi and C++ builder code). The same program is also due to Amiga OS 4.1 whenever I get my A1222 (looking at you Trevor *smile*).
Well, I hope that clears up any misunderstanding regarding these very separate but superficially related topics. Amibian.js will remain 100% Amiga focused – that has been and remains our goal.
Ode to our childhood
Amibian is and will always be, an ode to the people who gave us such a great childhood. People like David Pleasence who was the face of Commodore in europe. A man who embody the friendliness of the Amiga with his very being. Probably one of the warmest and kindest people I can think of.
Francois Lionet, author of Amos Basic. The man who made me a programmer and that I cannot thank enough. And I know I’m not alone about learning from him.
Mark Sibly, the author of BlitzBasic, the man who taught me all those assembler tricks. A man that deserves to go down in the history books as one of the best programmers in history.
And above all – the people who made the Amiga itself; giants like Jay Miner, Dave Haynie, Carl Sassenrath, Dave Needle, RJ Michal (forgive me for not listing all of you. Your contributions will never be forgotten).
That is what Amibian.js is all about.
Patents and greed may have killed the actual code. But we are free to implement whatever we like from scratch. And when I’m done – your patents will be worthless..
Amiga revival, Smart Pascal and growing up
Maybe its just me but the Amiga is kinda having a revival these days? Seems to me like the number of people going back to the Amiga has just exploded the past couple of years. Much of that is no doubt thanks to my buddy Gunnar Kristjannsen’s excellent work on the Amibian distro for Raspberry PI. Making a high-end Amiga experience that would have cost you thousands of dollars available at around $35.
Looking forward to some cosy reading
While Gunnar’s great distro is no doubt a huge factor in this, I believe its more than just easy access. I think a lot of us that grew up with the system, who lived the Amiga daily from elementary school all the way to college – have come full circle. We spend our days coding on PC’s, Mac’s or making mobile software – but deep down inside, I think all of us are still in love with that magical machine; The Commodore Amiga.
I am honestly at a loss for words on this (and that’s a first, most days you can’t get me to shut the hell up). Why should a 30-year-old system attract me more, and still cause so much joy in my life – compared to the latest stuff? I mean, I got a fat ass I7 that growls when you start it with 64 gigabyte ram, SSD and all the extras; I got macs all over the house, the latest consoles – and enough embedded boards to start my own arcade if I so desired.
Yet at the end of the day, when the kids are in bed and GF firmly planted in front of her favorite tv show, fathers are down in basements all around europe. Not watching porn, not practising black magic or trying to transform led into gold, nope: coding in assembler on a mc68k processor running at a whopping 7Mhz and loving every minute of it!
Today the madness held no bounds and forced me, out of sheer perverted joy, to order 4 copies of Amiga Future magazine (yes there are still magazines for the Amiga, believe it or not), a few posters, a mousemat and (drumroll) the ever sexy A1222. Actually that was a lie, I ordered that weeks ago, Trevor Dickenson over at A-EON hooked me up so im getting it as soon as it comes off the assembly line. And for those that don’t know, the A1222 is the new affordable Amiga that is released today. It’s not a remake of the older models, but a brand new thing. I havent been this giddy about a piece of silicon since I fell into a double-d cup at a beach in Spain last year.
Smart Pascal
It made sense to unite my two great computing passions, namely the object pascal language and Amiga into one package. So whenever I have some spare time I work my ass off on the update for Smart Mobile Studio. And it’s getting probably the biggest “demo” ever shipped with a programming language.
What? Well, a remake of the Amiga operating system. But not just a simple css-styled shallow lookalike. You know me, I just had to go all the way. So I married the system with something called uae.js. Which is essentially the JavaScript version of the Amiga emulator. Its compiled with EmScripten – a post processor that takes LLVM compiled bitcode compiled with C/C++ and spits out Asm.js optimized code.
You just cant kill it, Amiga is 4ever
So, Smart Pascal in one hand – C/C++ in the right hand. Its like being back in college all over again. Only thing missing now is that Wacom suddenly returns and Borland rise from the grave with another Turbo product. But yes, JavaScript is something I really enjoy. And being able to compile object pascal to JavaScript is even better.
The end result? Well since I don’t have too much time on my hands it’s roughly 31-32% done, and when we hit 50% is when UAE.js will be activated. So right now its a sexy cloud front end. It has a virtual filesystem that runs fine over localstorage, but it can also talk to node.js and access the real filesystem on your server.
But when UAE.js kicks in you will be able to run your favorite Amiga demos, applications and games in your browser. I am actually very excited about seeing the performance. It runs most demos OK (using the Aros rom-files). I imagine running things like blitzbasic, Amos basic and SAS-C/C++ should work fine. Or at least be within the “usable” range if you got a powerful PC to play with.
The V8 JavaScript engine in webkit is due for an overhaul next year – and while I can only speculate I’m guessing real-life compilation will be the addition. They already do some heavy JIT’ing but once you throw LLVM based actual compilation into the picture – large JS applications is going to fly side by side with native stuff. And that’s when cloud front-ends like ChromeOS and other FriendOS is going to take off.
My little remake is not that ambitious, but I do intend to make this an absolute kick-ass system as far as Amiga is concerned. And for Smart Pascal developers? Well, lets just say that this demo project has pushed the RTL for all it’s worth and helped fix bugs and expand the RTL in a way that makes it a real power-house!
Growing up
Do we ever really grow up? I’m not sure any more. I look at others and see some that have adopted this role, this image of how an adult should be like — but its more often than not tied into the whole A4 family thing or some superficial work profile. And since most Amiga fanatics are in their 40’s and 50’s (same age as Delphi hooligans, Turbo was released in 1983 same year as the Amiga came out), I guess this is when kids have grown up enough for people to go “wait a minute, what .. where is my Amiga!“.
But good things come to those who wait. If someone told me that I would one day work side by side with giants like David John Pleasance, Francois Lionet and the crew at FriendUp systems – I would never have believed them. A member of quartex in meetings with the head of Commodore? My teenage self would never have believed it. Both of these men, including all the tech guys at Commodore, Mark Sibly the guy behind BlitzBasic — these were my teenage heroes. And now I get to work with two of them. That is priceless.
As for growing up – if that means losing that spark, that trigger that when lost would render us incapable of enjoying things like the Amiga, reduced to a suit in a grey world of PCs – you know, then I’m happy to be exactly where I am. If you can go to work wearing an Amiga T-Shirt, tracker music on your iPod, a family you love at home, cool people to work with – I would call that a wrap.
And looking at the hundreds and thousands of people returning to the Amiga after 30 years in the desert – something tells me I wont be alone .. 😉
Smart Pascal: Node.js by example
The update for the Smart Mobile Studio RTL is nearing completion. We still have a little to go, but all in all we have cleaned up the VJL considerably and made a much better organization. We now have 3 namespaces (read: groups of units), namely: System, SmartCL and SmartNJ. The latter representing the Node.js aspect of our codebase. We also have a fourth namespace in the making, namely Embedded. Currently our embedded support is limited to Espruino – but I have begun working on the Arduino and Arduino mega codebase. When these are complete they will all be in the Embedded namespace.
Ok, node.js so where do I begin. Perhaps its best to explain a few fundamental keys to how the new RTL is organized so you understand just much Smart gives you over vanilla JavaScript.
I mentioned the system namespace above, but what exactly does that mean? The system namespace contains universal code. Code that runs on all JavaScript platforms regardless of a DOM being present or not. So you get to enjoy stuff like:
- Traditional TStream, TMemoryStream and TFileStream
- Codec classes
- Memory allocation and blue pointers
- Encryption classes
- Delayed execution (TW3Dispatch, system.time.pas)
- Event objects
- Filesystem
- Datatype conversion (system.type.convert)
- .. and the whole system namespace
Notice the TFileStream there? You will find that the system namspace contains an abstract implementation of a class called TFileSystem. And this is where things get funky. When you create a SmartCL application (that is, a visual HTML5 application), the implemented filesystem is in SmartCL.Filesystem. When you create a node.js application, the implemented filesystem can be found in SmartNJ.filesystem. See what I’m getting at here? The idea is that regardless of the runtime environment, you will always be able to use the same code no matter what engine you run on.
Ok, hopefully that gave you some context to work with, now let’s move on and create a fancy server for node.js !
Sexy server time
We are going to create a simple yet powerful UDP client / server application. I picked this because it’s sort of the odd-ball in our collection of server objects. UDP is connection-less and is ridiculously easy to use. At the same time there is no verification and assurance of delivery (that’s the flipside). But UDP is excellent for “live” logging, or for inter-service communication between micro-services on the same network or router.
Right, let’s just jump straight in:
var Server: TNJUDPServer;
Server := TNJUDPServer.Create;
Server.OnMessage := procedure (Sender: TObject; Data: variant;
RequestInfo: TNJUDPRequestInfo)
begin
writeln("Recieved data:" + string(data));
end;
Server.OnError := procedure (Sender: TObject;
ErrorObj: TJsErrorObject)
begin
writelnF("Error[%s]: %s", [variant(ErrorObj.stack).toString(), ErrorObj.message]);
end;
Server.OnClose := procedure (Sender: TObject; ErrorObj: TJsErrorObject)
begin
writeln("Server closed");
end;
Server.OnAfterServerStarted := procedure (sender: TObject)
begin
server.Send("Your first Smart server is now running");
end;
Server.Port := 1881;
Server.Address := '127.0.0.1';
Server.MulticastLoopback := true;
Server.Broadcast := true;
server.Exclusive:= false;
Server.Start();
Congratulations! You have just created your first node.js powered UDP server! It doesnt get much easier than this does it? Try to guess how much JS code you would have to write to get all the perks of the system namespace + the node.js namespace.
Some guy commented on an article I wrote the other day, asking me to give him a single reason why Smart Mobile Studio is better than just writing JavaScript. The answere is simple: producivity. Some of the code you get in a simple class in Smart represents hundreds or thousands of lines of JavaScript code.
What do you think is more productive? Maintaining 2 megabyte of raw JavaScript code; a binary kebab of spaghetti code that can go belly up if you missplace as much as a comma. Or the 2k of clean, easy to read, easy to understand object oriented pascal code?
I rest my case.
Right, with the server done already, let’s have a peek at the client:
LClient := TNJUDPClient.Create;
LClient.Port := 1881;
LClient.Address := "localhost";
LClient.Bindings.Add('127.0.0.1',1881);
LClient.OnAfterStarted := procedure (sender: TObject)
begin
LClient.Send("Client is now active", 1881, 'localhost',
procedure (ErrorObj: TJsErrorObject)
begin
writeln("An error occured:" + ErrorObj.Stack.ToString());
end);
LClient.Active := true;
And that my friend is pretty much it!
Node.js really is awesome once you get to approach it on our terms. When you come to the JavaScript virtual machine through the OOP layer that Smart Pascal gives you, it’s a whole different reality.
Write a cluster ready, platform independent client/server application in less time than it takes to boot up Visual studio
What is the benefit here you might ask? All of this can be done in Delphi and Lazarus without much problem. The benefit is this: the generated code is platform independent, it will run on any platform as long as node.js is installed. It will behave identical regardless of operating-system. And you can cluster, clone and replicate instances to your heart’s desire.
Node.js is also easy to host, cheap and accessible. Native hosting is expensive and requires much more work. When something goes wrong inside a 200 megabyte service hosted on Amazon.. I have been there. Having to track down the bugs, re-build the executable while your boss is going mental – spend 10 minutes just uploading the damn thing, then you have to uninstall the service, reboot the whole instance, re-install the new .exe file and hope that you did manage to catch that bug.
Compare that to fixing the bug, uploading the new JS file and then inform PM2 that you need to hot-swap the service code. It’s a whole new paradigm.
Websocket server
With UDP behind us, let’s look at something a lot more complex. And when I write complex, I dont mean for you. Websocket is the fastest growing protocol standard these days. It’s basically an extension of the ordinary HTTP protocol. It is designed for long-term connections (read: not stateless, single shot operations like http) and is full duplex and async. So the server can talk to the client and visa versa without having to wait it’s turn. Just fire off as many messages as you like, whenever you like – and it will arive in the same order on the other side.
var
LServer: TNJWebSocketServer;
LServer := TNJWebSocketServer.Create;
LServer.ClientTracking := true;
LServer.Port := 1881;
// Setup our own protocol commands
LServer.On("command1", procedure (const Socket: JWsSocket; const Data: variant)
begin
writeln("Command #1 executed, recieved data:");
writeln(data);
end);
LServer.On("command2", procedure (const Socket: JWsSocket; const Data: variant)
begin
writeln("Command #2 executed");
// broadcast a "hello" response with a byte array to *ALL*
// connected clients. Making chat applications is very easy here
socket.Emit("Hello", [12,13,14,14]);
end);
LServer.Active := true;
If you look closely you will notice the use of the On keyword. This is what we use to define our server-side protocol. It’s essentially trigger words that you associate with a piece of code. When the server recieves a message it will read the message-name, look up a associated code and execute it. But let’s look at the background for this so you dont end up downloading the wrong package.
Normally you install the node.js websocket package first, and then you install something called socket.io on top of that. The On keyword we used above is actually not a part of the default websocket standard (which is more low level). This functionality is provided by a separate package called socket.io.
But, since most people install and use websocket just to use socket.io, it makes sense to merge these two packages into a single, stand-alone distro that gives you everything in one go. And this package is cleverly named Websocket-IO (it’s just knockout names isnt it).
I usually install node packages in my project output folder
If you want to read more about websocket-io, head over to the npm website and have a peek at: https://www.npmjs.com/package/nodejs-websocket
Client: Needless to say, the client class is just as simple so I dont really see a point in repeating that. In fact, all servers and clients inherit from the same base-class.
What should be stressed is that websocket is easy to use from Delphi as well. So if you have a native client and want to talk with your node.js server, I strongly suggest you stay clear of REST (which is one of the most wasteful protocols ever invented) and instead use websocket.
Note: since websocket is an extension to http, it is perfectly safe to use in a commercial environment. REST requires a lot more CPU and generates much more data on the network than websocket. The most time consuming and intensive aspects of a http call is during connection, and websocket is based on async and full duplex communication, with message caching and more handled automatically – so there is no reason why you should chose REST over websocket.
Websocket allows you to broadcast messages, or to filter messages based on criteria. Messaging and data-flow protocols are very easy to implement
When you add the fact that websocket is also allowed from the browser, you can offer your services to the Javascript community without any extra development. So you get to cater for both native and JS clients. Being able to connect and interact with your custom servers directly from the browser opens up new possebilities. Want to display live information? With a full duplex connection the server can now inform you whenever something has changed instead of your clients polling on interval.
A Delphi extension to websocket (for Indy) was implemented and released by Andre Mussche a while back. The code is super easy to work with and bridges the world of Smart Pascal and Delphi quite nicely:
https://github.com/andremussche/DelphiWebsockets
If you need information about how to use websocket regardless of language, just google the topic. There are thousands of resources out there.
Last but not least
I hope you have found this super simple introduction to node.js server coding inspirational. Node.js is a huge topic and there are roughly 350.000 different packages available online for it. Writing wrapper classes for node packages is not hard either. You do have to know your way around object pascal and Javascript, but if you look at my units and how we have solved it, you should pick it up very fast.
In the future I hope to generate a 1:1 import tool that will download, convert and install packages for you automatically.
Cheers guys!
