mORMot

mORMot, la boîte à outils

We’re going to tell you about mORMot, a piece of software present in WAPT but that few of you know about. As you may know from its history, Tranquil IT had developed WAPT as opensource. For economic reasons and due to a lack of contribution, we switched to proprietary software. The whole company remains very attached to open source values.

Always being very close to open source, Vincent and Denis decided 2 years ago to use mORMot and therefore to hire Arnaud who is its developer. Itst Hubert (our developer who built WAPT with Denis) who, while looking for software, spotted it in his research. What Hubert liked was the optimization, the memory consumption and thetime saved by not reinventing the wheel internally. That’s how the software joined the great adventure that is WAPT. If mORMot appealed to Hubert, it’s because he shares the same values as its creator Arnaud Bouchez. Together, they share the original spirit of computer scientists who use Object Pascal. And yes, the Pascal language is still in use around the world!

What is mORMot?

mORMot is a software program created 10 years ago by Arnaud. It defines itself as a toolbox. mORMot can be used as a management tool and client server to make various servers communicate with each other with other clients. It is mainly used in industry and services. mORMot is in modern object Pascal (with classes, interfaces, generics, RTTI) and runs on both Lazarus and Delphi. Delphi is a proprietary tool from Embarcadero, Free Pascal is a modern free compiler whose integrated development environment (IDE) is Lazarus. mORMot has a strong performance record, ranking first out of 770 frameworks tested in the TechEmpower Framework Benchmarks.

It’s used in Brazil (there’s a large community of Pascal users), Eastern Europe and France. Its users can exchange exchanges on the forum, which currently has 2500 members.

At Tranquil IT we use mORMot directly in WAPT, it constitutes the bricks that are used to build WAPT. One of our developers (Andréas) works closely with Arnaud to advance mORMot while interweaving it with WAPT. In short, it’s part of the foundation of WAPT, enabling us to go faster in a secure way.

mORMot isn’t just used for WAPT, as other companies use it too. One of mORMot’s major assets is that the documentation is auto-generated. What’s more, Arnaud emphasizes the security aspect of the software, which makes it high-performance and optimized.

mORMot Version 2

It took Arnaud 3 years to develop version 2. In fact, the first commit was on March 6, 2020! This version is more stable over time. Version 2 came into existence because the original code wasn’t modular enough; he had to rework all the code for mORMot to live another 10 years. One of the strengths: mORMot 2 is cross-platform for Linux and Windows servers. It is multi-platform (which is very interesting, especially for WAPT).

All new projects should use mORMot 2. We recommend migrating from version 1 to version 2. If you are using mORMot version 1, it is not difficult to switch. There is no need for a complete rewrite, and the ease of migration is an important factor in choosing a framework.

Useful Links

• For an analysis of the mORMot 2 project source code
• mORMot 2 on GitHub
• mORMot Forum
• Delphi
• Free Pascal and Lazarus
• Benchmarks