Eoin Prout

To mark its appointment as the Master reseller for CodeGear in Ireland, MicroMail hosted a free CodeGear workshop at Jurys Hotel in Cork last Tuesday (23/Oct/2007).
This is good news as my experience of MicroMail has always been positive.

Ireland usually gets lumped in with the UK by most companies, so being from Cork and having used Delphi for the last ten years it was great to have a workshop in my hometown.

The workshop was presented by two evangelists from CodeGear and they went through the latest batch of products on offer from CodeGear.
- RAD Studio 2007
- JGear Plug-ins for Eclipse 3.2
- Delphi for PHP
- 3rd Rail (Ruby on Rails)
- JBuilder 2007
- C++Builder 2007
- BlackFish SQL

I’m not a Ruby fan-boy but the 3rd Rail demo really wowed me,
I’ve never seen a functional web app which uses a database created so easily and quickly.
This could be a very successful product for CodeGear.

BlackFish SQL is the long awaited replacement for the BDE and I was impressed but I’m concerned that the licensing model CodeGear have chosen will prevent widespread take up.

I was able to raise my concerns over Unicode support in Delphi and was assured that it is on the road map and hopefully will be out sometime in 2008.

After the workshop an excellent buffet lunch was laid on and we had the chance to talk with the CodeGear people.
An interesting morning that for some reason passed completely under the IT@Cork radar ?

All done with Pivot

I should point out that Pivot is written in Delphi

Yes! Regular Expressions are simple once you learn the grammar, and thats also the biggest problem with them, unless you learn the grammar, Regular Expressions look like the gibberish of some dark art, And unless you actually sit down and study you’ll not make much progress with them.

There are some good books on Regular Expressions.
Regular Expression Pocket Reference

Mastering Regular Expressions

Once you have Regular Expressions in your tool box you’ll quickly see many uses they can be put to such as page scraping or data validation, I’ve even seen them used them for updating Delphi code bases to the latest version of Delphi.

In the train timetable service I used 3 Regular expressions to extract the information need to output optimized version of the time table.

The first two

/<input type=”hidden” name=”DepTime” value=”[0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9]

/<nput type=”hidden” name=”ArrTime” value=”[0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9]

Are used to strip out the table elements which contain the departure and arrival times,
The strings which match the patterns are stored in two arrays, one for arrival and one of departures.

Then iterating through the two arrays a third regular expression is used

[0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9]

This Regular Expression returns the times from the strings contained in the two arrays and it is this information which is used to produce the timetables you see when using the service.

I’d be interested to hear an if there is an even easier way to do this.

There is an excellent tool available for working with Regular Expression, Regex Buddy It is a fantastic piece of software.

Most languages and platforms support Regular Expressions, For Delphi you can use the TRegex component which is free, for Delphi .NET it’s not needed as .NET supports Regular Expressions.