News, articles, and notes
Writing on Delphi, the web, and the seam between them.
Deep dives, opinions, project notes, and conference reports. Updated whenever something is worth saying.
Featured
The Date Type JSON Doesn't Have
Part two of the JSON series for Delphi developers — why JSON has no date type, the two conventions everyone uses instead, what each one costs you, and how to read and write ISO 8601 correctly with System.DateUtils.
- Delphi
- JSON
- REST
- APIs
- DateUtils
Read article
Free to read, not free to make. Everything here is published without ads or paywalls, funded by readers.
How to support01 — More recent
See all 78 →You're Already Surrounded by JSON — Here's What It Actually Is
Open your editor right now and think about the last thing you built that talked to the outside world. A REST call to a payment provider. A config file your app reads on startup. A webhook from GitHub. The response from a weather service, a…
- Delphi
- JSON
- REST
- APIs
List a Folder in One Call: The IOUtils Cookbook (2/2)
In Part 1 we met System.IOUtils and its central surprise — that TFile, TDirectory, and TPath are records, not classes, so you call them through the type name and never Create or Free a thing. We put TFile through its paces: reading a whole…
- Delphi
- IOUtils
- Object Pascal
- Directories
- Cross-Platform
Read a Whole File in One Line: The IOUtils Cookbook (1/2)
Here's a line of Delphi almost every one of us has typed: It works. It has worked since the last century. There is nothing wrong with it. But somewhere along the way — quietly, without a fanfare that reached most of us — the RTL grew a…
- Delphi
- IOUtils
- Object Pascal
- Files
- Cross-Platform
Qwen vs. Ornith: Two Local AI Models, One CD Calculator
Last time, a 27-billion-parameter model on my laptop wrote a slick, charted CD calculator from a single sentence — correct math, wrong tool — and a cloud referee caught the domain error. This time I ran the exact same experiment with a…
- LLM
- Qwen
- Ornith
- Local AI
- MLX
A Local AI Wrote a CD Calculator — and Why I Still Had Claude Check the Math
A model small enough to live entirely on my laptop built a working, charted CD calculator from a one-line prompt. It was fast, it looked great, and the arithmetic was correct. It was also, quietly, the wrong tool — and spotting that took a…
- LLM
- Qwen
- Local AI
- Claude
- JavaScript
Web Services Are Just Endpoints: REST and JSON in Delphi (5/5)
Part 4 ended on a quiet little bombshell. We built a web server with WebBroker, watched a browser send GET / down a TCP connection, and sent back HTML — and then I pointed out that nothing in HTTP says the response has to be HTML. A…
- Delphi
- Networking
- REST
- Web Services
- TMS XData
02 — The archive
71 more articles, back to 2023.
Every article ever published, grouped by year and month.