Embarcadero RAD Studio XE6 Test (After Thought)

After testing Embarcadero RAD Studio XE6 for sometimes, here are some findings/summary of mine.

Pros:

• great for rapid prototyping
• easy to use (for simple app)
• single code base (delphi/c++) for multi-platform (FMX), Win32, Win64, Android, iOS, OSX.
• ARC for ui components (a feature that Qt already have when I first use it)
• FireDAC for easy database app creation
• REST components
• Some eye-catching features like Application Tethering, Integration with BaaS, InApp Purchase and Advertising components ...

Cons:

• some design issue. e.g. grid assume all cells with same content alignment. (Who will use a table with contents all right-justified?)
• not fully multi-platform. e.g. webbrowser not available on Windows platform
• runtime library a bit large (>30MB in release mode)
• startup time a bit long, especially for android, may be due to the large runtime library
• issue with multi-threading on iOS, got unexpected AV
• sometimes need tweaking, e.g. reorder your code execution sequence, to display properly. The most noticeable one is TWebBrowser on iOS, you need to make TWebBrowser component visible before assigning url, otherwise, the component seems invisible. Also, you need to make it invisible before you can show your other ui components as the TWebBrowser, if visible, will cover up all other components. (may be it is due to the fact that I've placed the webrowsee on a TLayout)

Some suggestions:

• Minimize the forms used in development as starting up a form takes long time, that's why I use a TLayout with TWebBrowser in the above
• TabControl may be another choice for page navigation
• One initialize your first page and postpone all other initialization process to a later time using timer, especially for android to shorten the black screen delay during startup

Embarcadero RAD Studio XE6

There is a long time not updating this blog. As recently I have been assigned for a job to test and try developing cross-platform application using Embarcadero RAD Studio XE6.

For paid solution, it seems a great tool. But I need to investigate more.

Swiftkey 5 go free

http://m.androidcentral.com/swiftkey-5-goes-free-adds-number-row-emjoi-and-paid-themes

Windows batch to download and make a portable JDK

I am a fan of portable apps and don't like to install stuff unless there is no other choices, as installation on Windows platform usually will introduce some unexpected "side-effect".

JDK is one of the tool that I need but don't want to install during development. I want to perform some automated tasks to set up a portable development environment (for android development). But downloading and extracting the JDK in a workable state are a bit tricky. Here is what I have performed to automate the process under Windows environment.

To automate the task using Windows batch script, you will need to acquire the following command tools first.

• wget.exe
• 7z.exe and 7z.dll

To download the JDK (e.g. jdk-7u55-windows-i586.exe) from Oracle using wget.exe and extract the JDK to.\jdk_1.7.0_55, copy the following contents to a text file and save it as "getJDK.bat" in the folder where wget.exe and 7z.exe resided.

@echo off
"%~dp0wget.exe" --no-check-certificate -O "%~dp0jdk-7u55-windows-i586.exe" "http://download.oracle.com/otn-pub/java/jdk/7u55-b13/jdk-7u55-windows-i586.exe" --no-cookies --header "Cookie: gpw_e24=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.oracle.com%2F; oraclelicense=accept-securebackup-cookie"
"%~dp07z.exe" x -y "%~dp0jdk-7u55-windows-i586.exe" -o"%~dp0jdk_1.7.0_55"
"%~dp07z.exe" x -y "%~dp0jdk_1.7.0_55\tools.zip"  -o"%~dp0jdk_1.7.0_55"
del "%~dp0jdk_1.7.0_55\tools.zip"
for /r "%~dp0jdk_1.7.0_55" %%x in (*.pack) do "%~dp0jdk_1.7.0_55\bin\unpack200" "%%x" "%%x.jar"
for /r "%~dp0jdk_1.7.0_55" %%y in (*.pack) do ren "%%y" "%%~ny.pack.org"
for /r "%~dp0jdk_1.7.0_55" %%z in (*.pack.jar) do ren "%%z" "%%~nz"
for /r "%~dp0jdk_1.7.0_55" %%a in (*.pack) do ren "%%a" "%%~na.jar"
for /r "%~dp0jdk_1.7.0_55" %%y in (*.pack.org) do del "%%y"

And lastly, double click "getJDK.bat" to start the process. After the process finished, the folder "jdk_1.7.0_55" should contain a workable JDK.

Don't forget to set the JAVA_HOME environment variable to point to your JDK folder and also add the %JAVA_HOME%\bin to the PATH environment in order to use the JDK wherever you are.

OpenSSL Heartbleed bug updates - compile openssl 1.0.1g using TDM-GCC

Due to the OpenSSL Heartbleed issue, you should update openssl to the latest 1.0.1g. But searching the web, there is no suitable precompile version for Windows that suit my need. So I have to get my hand dirty to compile by myself.

To compile, you need the following tools on hand.

• ActivePerl-5.16.3.1603-MSWin32-x86-296746
• TDM-GCC-4.7.1-2
• TDM64-GCC-4.7.1-2
• MSYS-1.0.11

I've install the above stuff into the following folders respectively.

• ActivePerl: c:\dev\perl
• TDM-GCC: c:\dev\tdm\x32
• TDM64-GCC: c:\dev\tdm\x64
• MSYS: c:\dev\msys

Of course, you will need to have openssl-1.0.1g.tar.gz and I've placed it under c:\dev\openssl.


All the steps below should be carried out inside the MSYS prompt, so you need to start MSYS first by double-click the msys.bat inside MSYS installation folder.

export PATHBACKUP=$PATH
export PATH="/c/dev/tdm/x32/bin:/c/dev/perl/bin:$PATHBACKUP"
cd "/c/dev/openssl"
tar -zxvf openssl-1.0.1g.tar.gz
mv openssl-1.0.1g x32
cd x32
./Configure --prefix=$PWD/dist no-idea no-mdc2 no-rc5 shared mingw
make depend && make && make install

export PATH="/c/dev/tdm/x64/bin:/c/dev/perl/bin:$PATHBACKUP"
cd "/c/dev/openssl"
tar -zxvf openssl-1.0.1g.tar.gz
mv openssl-1.0.1g x64
cd x32
./Configure --prefix=$PWD/dist no-idea no-mdc2 no-rc5 shared mingw64
make depend && make && make install

NOTE: You should not extract the openssl-1.0.1g.tar.gz with any archiver, e.g. 7zip under Windows. You should extract using the tar command inside MSYS prompt instead.

The reason why I need to have both TDM64-GCC and TDM-GCC is that I cannot find a way to tell MSYS to use x32 libraries and toolchains with TDM64-GCC. The work around is to set the PATH for different toolchains folder with different architectures.

If you don't want to compiled by yourself, you may download my precompiled openssl-1.0.1g-tdm-tdm64.7z which use tdm-gcc to build with both x32 and x64 libraries included.

Name :openssl-1.0.1g-tdm-tdm64.7z
Size :3715883 bytes
MD5  :A9D23198AA4F6A41DA7954AB7CE8ABFE
SHA1 :9E225DAA6A793618009CFD729420AD5CDEB0A38D

Microsoft Office for Android is now Free

Microsoft just announce that their Office for Android is now FREE. No need to subscribe for their 360 cloud service to use now.
http://techtradition.blogspot.com/2014/03/microsoft-office-for-android-is-now-free.html?m=1

EcereSDK 0.44.09.0 Portable with OpenSSL (shared and static)

Finally have time to play with EcereSDK. In my own opinion, it is more convenience than Qt.

• Size is small
• Easier to build than Qt
• The SDK is more portable 

There already have portable versions around, the EcereSDKPortable by Ryoanji. However, it is based on 0.44 SDK two years ago without any new updates. So, I decided to build my own portable version for the latest 0.44.09.9 as of my writing. Instead of using Mingw-w64, I have chosen TDM-GCC.

Thanks to Ecere Teams' efforts, building the SDK on Windows platform is very easy and fast, no quirks needed. Just download the sdk source, the toolchains and upx. Open a command prompt with administrator right and set up the corresponding path. Finally run "mingw32-make" will do the job. As I am building a portable sdk, I did not run "mingw32-make install".

This only takes me around half an hour to build the sdk with a fully functional ide. And it only that me another half hour to build the static libraries as well. That's a big contrast with Qt.You may argue that Qt may be much more powerful, e.g. they have include QML, WebKit, JavaScript engine, ... and others. But the size and time to take for building Qt just not my cup of tea as I just want a simple tools to create cross-platform applications.

After building the SDK, it is time for me to really play with the eC language.

If you are interested to my build, you can find the final products and the corresponding tools at EcereSDK Portable.

• EcereSDKPortable-0.44.09.9_tdmgcc-4.7.1-3_openssl-1.0.0e.7z: Just extract the file (preserve folder structure) to any folder you want. After unzip, run "<FolderForExtraction>\EcereSDKPortable\ide.bat" to start using the tools.
• EcereSDKPortable-0.44.09.9_tdmgcc-4.7.1-3_openssl-1.0.0e_build_script.7z: This contains the Windows batch script, tools (7z.exe and wget.exe) and some supporting files. The batch file is handcrafted by myself and may contains errors not trapped. What the script doing is using wget to grab the files required to build the SDK from their original site (you can find the location inside the batch file with variable urlXXX. If you cannot find the files in the original web site, a copy of them can be found in the same folder as well. The script just build the x32 and x64 shared version of the SDK. Static libs and SQLCipher drivers (shared and static) required to use the IDE to build as I cannot find ways to just using command line to build all the stuff. If anyone has any idea on how to do all the stuff with Windows command line, please share with me so that I can perform some fully automated build testing stuff.

The batch file has only been tested on Windows 7 64 bit and Windows Server 2008 R2 64 bit platform as these are the only Windows boxes that is available to me. Building on 32 bit platform may not worked as the batch file assume default architecture is 64 bit. Tweaking with the batch file may help but not guaranteed. Running the batch inside VirtualBox will certainly failed, which may be due to the DirectX support is missing or incompatible.

2014/04/01
NOTE:  Due to unknown reason, in order to debug your project, you need to copy the gdb.exe as x86_64-w64-mingw32-gdb.exe under EcereSDKPortable\tdm\bin. It seems the ide cannot recognize the existence of gdb.exe (in version 0.44.08, I did not need to do this steps).

2014/04/02
NOTE: You will also need to download the gdb for x32 to debug the x32 version of your project. Save the gdb.exe as i686-w64-mingw32-gdb.exe under EcereSDKPortable\tdm\bin. This gdb.exe require libexpat-1.dll in the same folder, and jit-reader.h under EcereSDKPortable\tdm\include\gdb. 

Hole In WhatsApp For Android Lets Hackers Steal Your Conversations

Hole In WhatsApp For Android Lets Hackers Steal Your Conversations

That's awful!! But the most awful part is the hole has been known a long time ago which I only recognized recently. Though its an issue related to android's sandbox architecture, I think WhatsApp should implement another security measure so that we can use it more comfortably.

WhatsApp interesting new feature

WhatsApp 2.11.186 Update Offers New Privacy Settings, 'Pay For A Friend,' And More

You can pay for your friend's WhatsApp subscriptions!!

And finally, Android users can manipulate their "last seen" settings.

Whatsapp acquired by Facebook!

Whatsapp acquired by Facebook! Good or Bad? What's your opinion?

Qt - I love you, hate you.

Ecere SDK

This is an interesting cross-platform sdk (http://www.ecere.com). It is c with object, like c++. But seems easier to learn and code than c++. It should build fine on Linux, on Windows with MinGW or MinGW-w64 or TDM-GCC, on Mac OS X with Xcode command line tools installed or on FreeBSD (with gmake). Executables can also be deployed to the Android platform using the Android NDK.

The SDK includes complete development environment for coding and GUI designer, supports including c and c++ code as part of the project and got cross-platform GUI toolkit with 2D and 3D graphic engines, though the GUI components are somewhat primitive.

The runtime component covers file access, multithreading, time and networking (with SSL Sockets support through OpenSSL). With the EDA (Ecere Data Access) components, you will be able to access Ecere RDBMS, SQLite (as well as an encrypted version using SQLiteCipher), and Oracle databases. It also has a simple report engine with preview support. The runtime libraries size is below 10MB.

The most impressive thing is, the Ecere SDK is Free Open Source Software licensed under a revised BSD license which allows applications built with it can be distributed both commercially and non
commercially, along with the supporting Ecere runtime library(ies).

 

Compile Qt 5.2.0 with ICU

Finally find a way to compile Qt 5.2.0 with ICU. It seems the PATH, LIBS and INCLUDE environment variable somehow being reset/ignore during the build process. So, in order to help the compiler and/or linker to find ICU libraries, I've copied all the ICU development files to Qt source tree and the compiler and/or linker now recognized the existence of ICU libraries and build Qt 5.2.0 shared version successfully with WebKit support.