NetCLX

Overview

• Cross-platform Internet/Web components
• WebBroker is a part of NetCLX
• Includes Socket components
• Indy components will ship in Delphi 6 and Kylix
• Download now from http://www.nevrona.com/indy
• Open source project. You can help!
• Replacement for WinShoes and FastNet components

Demo

• Moving from Windows to Linux requires two {$ifdef} statements groups
• One for the case of the .dpr resource file
• One for the case of the .dfm file. (.xfm is currently used in Kylix)

Session management

• Cookies – Cookie property
• Fat URLs
• Sessions
• Session management integrated in Delphi 6

Web Page Appearance

• Style sheets
• Header and footer templates in AfterDispatch

Error handling

• Find as many error conditions as possible
• Present them at the top of the page
• Prevent round-trips from the client to the server

Caching content

• On-demand content generation
• TCustomCache component
• Cache dirty?
• Interval (time lapse)
• File missing
• Customized through validation event
• Content handling
• Descendants implement content handling
• SetContent
• GetContent

TCustomCache Descendants

• TCustomCache
• TStreamCache
• TFileCache
• TWebCache
• TDataSetCache
• TDataSetPageCache

TStreamCache

• Stream property, but no management
• Create the stream using the events

TFileCache

• Assumes a file-based stream
• Stream is automatically created based on the file name
• Directories will be auto-created
• Helper functions
• DateToPath converts the current date to a directory path to improve content organization
• Overloaded FileSize() will be in Delphi 6, doesn't require opening the file

TWebCache

• Caches content to a file
• Can create content from TCustomContentProducer, like a TWebActionItem

TDataSetCache

• Caches dataset results to a TClientDataset Briefcase file
• Set or retrieve content using an XML data packet (string)
• Threshold can be used for optimizing retrieval logic. If it's faster to retrieve from the database than load, don't save the cache

TDataSetPageCache

• Implements page of
• Changing display order by clicking on table heading
• Could use for saving user-specific query results

Personalized cached content

• Embed webbroker tags in the cache output
• Process the WebBroker tags to identify users right before sending response
• Other solutions:
• Custom style sheets per user
• XSL per user