Evaluation of. Integrated Election Software. Development Environment

Transcription

1 Evaluation of Integrated Election Software Development Environment PMI Software Ltd. Prepared by: John Pugh, Robert Doherty Date of last Update: Friday, 14 December 2001 Document Type: Project Output Document Name: Development Environment Evaluation.doc

2 Table of Contents 1 Introduction Borland Delphi History Desktop Database Development With Delphi Evaluation Opus DirectAccess Introduction DAO Using Opus DirectAccess Redistribution to End-Users Evaluation TurboPower AsyncPro Introduction Evaluation Conclusion Revision History...12 Development Environment Evaluation.doc Page 2 of 12 Issue No: 01

3 1 Introduction Powervote s Integrated Election Software system was written using Borland Delphi 5, which Borland claims is the fastest, most productive Windows development tool for building database applications. As well as the standard Delphi tools, the IES developers used several third party components and libraries, most notably Opus DirectAccess and TurboPower AsyncPro. The purpose of this document is to evaluate all of these products and to examine the manner in which they are used in the IES source code. Development Environment Evaluation.doc Page 3 of 12 Issue No: 01

4 2 Borland Delphi 2.1 History The roots of Delphi are in the Turbo Pascal language, which was first released by Borland in When the first version of Delphi was released in 1995, it built upon Turbo Pascal to create it s own object oriented language, Object Pascal. Delphi 1 combined the Object Pascal language with the comprehensive Visual Component Library (VCL), a collection of more than 75 objects such as dialogs, buttons, and list boxes, including a set of reusable objects for channelling data from databases to a client application. Delphi 1 was a 16-bit Rapid Application Development tool for Windows 3.x. In 1996 Borland released the 32-bit Delphi 2, which contained all of the features of Delphi 1 and added a host of new functionality. At the time, Delphi 2 was the most advanced Windows rapid development tool available on the market, as the following quotes attest: "What made Delphi hot in 1995 will make it hotter in It manages to balance the flexibility and power of an object oriented programming language with the speed of a rapid application development tool, and it has strong database integration features." - Sean Gallagher, InfoWorld, January 1, 1996 "Delphi is the most important new paradigm since the introduction of visual programming. By combining the simplicity and ease of use of visual RAD tools, the power and speed of an optimising compiler, and the elegance of an object-oriented language, Delphi sets a new standard in applications development." - PC Magazine, December 19, 1995 Winner: Technical Excellence, Development Tools "Delphi is the summation of everything the software industry has learned during the first decade of the Windows era." - Windows Tech Journal, December 1, 1995 Since then Borland have released an update on average every months, the latest being Delphi 6, which was released in Delphi 5 was released in Development Environment Evaluation.doc Page 4 of 12 Issue No: 01

5 2.2 Desktop Database Development With Delphi 5 Easy, reliable desktop database development has been a feature of Delphi since its initial launch. Borland accomplished this by shipping a product called the Borland Database Engine (BDE) with Delphi and by adding a powerful set of database components to the Visual Component Library (VCL). The BDE allows standalone, full client database applications, and database application servers to communicate with databases. An application s database connections, drivers, cursors, queries, and so on are maintained within the context of one or more BDE sessions. Sessions isolate a set of database access operations, such as database connections, without the need to start another instance of the application. In an application, BDE sessions are managed using the TSession and TSessionList components. Each TSession component in an application encapsulates a single BDE session. All sessions within an application are managed by a single TSessionList component. All database applications automatically include a session component, named Session, which encapsulates the default BDE session. Applications can declare, create, and manipulate additional session components as needed. All database applications also automatically include a session list component, named Sessions, which enables the application to manage all of its session components. The Delphi VCL Database components allow the client application to easily connect to a database, extract data, display the data, update it, and apply the changes back to the database. By default, the VCL components communicate with the database via the BDE, however in the IES application the calls to the BDE are instead re-rerouted to a product called Opus DirectAccess. 2.3 Evaluation As a long-term user of Delphi, I can confirm that Delphi is an excellent choice as a tool for developing applications to run against an Access desktop database. The various tools within Delphi lend themselves to the creation of a fast, reliable, attractive client application. In addition, Delphi s ability to connect to an Access database and to manipulate the data within is second to none. Development Environment Evaluation.doc Page 5 of 12 Issue No: 01

6 3 Opus DirectAccess 3.1 Introduction Opus DirectAccess provides Delphi programs with a comprehensive, efficient interface to Microsoft Access databases. It replaces Delphi's normal database interface (BDE) with a much leaner intermediate layer that talks directly to the native Access database engine (DAO). 3.2 DAO Opus DirectAccess uses Data Access Objects (DAO), a set of OLE classes that Microsoft supplies for natively interfacing with Access databases on 32-bit platforms (Windows 95 and Windows NT 3.5 and higher). 3.3 Using Opus DirectAccess Delphi programs can use Opus DirectAccess to interface with Access databases in two ways: Transparent Access Transparent Access intercepts calls to the Borland Database Engine by applications and diverts them to a dedicated and fast interface to the Microsoft Jet Engine. They then interface very efficiently through DAO and the Jet Engine to Access databases. Programmed Access Programmed Access is a Delphi unit, which defines all the DAO objects and methods for use in application code. DAO is the native interface to the Jet engine and allows control of every single detail of the engine and the Access databases. While DAO is accessible with plain Delphi using OLE Automation, this is very slow. The DAO interface supplied by Opus is faster by an order of magnitude. DAO includes services such as CreateEngine, OpenDataBase, OpenRecordSet, OpenTable, CreateQueryDef, MoveFirst, MoveNext, FindFirst, and Seek, but also replication, synchronization, and database schema control. When using Programmed Access only, the portions of programs that interface with the BDE are not affected. Mixed Access Sometimes developers may want to mix the simplicity of Transparent Access and the power of Programmed Access. Opus DirectAccess makes this very easy. Mixed Access allows you to use the powerful DAO services with ordinary TTable or TQuery objects to supply the context. Development Environment Evaluation.doc Page 6 of 12 Issue No: 01

7 3.4 Redistribution to End-Users To distribute applications developed with Opus DirectAccess, the developer must ensure that customers have DAO installed. In order to distribute DAO to customers, the developer must own a Microsoft product, which entitles him/her to distribute DAO. Such products are, for instance, the Microsoft Access 95 Developer's Toolkit, Microsoft Visual Basic 4.0 Professional, and Microsoft Visual C The royalty-free distribution licence for Opus DirectAccess does not entitle the developer to distribute DAO, only the redistributable Opus DirectAccess components. Nevertheless, for such users that may legally redistribute DAO, Opus DirectAccess contains installation instructions and support for the redistributable DAO components. 3.5 Evaluation Powervote s IES application uses Opus DirectAccess to interface with its Access databases using Transparent Access. We have tested the application itself by creating and processing an election with approximately 60,000 votes. The application processed all of the information in a fast and efficient manner without any problems. In addition we created a test application that uses the same methodologies as the IES application when operating on an access table. The test application allows the user to specify the number of records to insert into a table in a test database. The user can also choose to edit and delete these records as required. The application records a start and end time for each operation. Development Environment Evaluation.doc Page 7 of 12 Issue No: 01

8 The table structure is as follows: Field Name Field Type Field Size (Bytes) FIELD_1 LONGINT 4 FIELD_2 TEXT 50 FIELD_3 TEXT 50 FIELD_4 TEXT 50 FIELD_5 TEXT 50 FIELD_6 TEXT 50 FIELD_7 TEXT 50 FIELD_8 TEXT 50 FIELD_9 TEXT 50 FIELD_10 TEXT 50 FIELD_11 TEXT 50 FIELD_12 TEXT 50 FIELD_13 TEXT 50 FIELD_14 TEXT 50 FIELD_15 TEXT 50 FIELD_16 TEXT 50 FIELD_17 TEXT 50 FIELD_18 TEXT 50 FIELD_19 TEXT 50 FIELD_20 TEXT 50 FIELD_21 TEXT 50 FIELD_22 TEXT 50 FIELD_23 TEXT 50 FIELD_24 TEXT 50 FIELD_25 TEXT 50 We performed several tests using this application running locally on a Windows NT 4.0 PC with 256M RAM, the results were as follows: Test 1 Date 14/11/2001 Operation No. Records Start Finish Time Taken Insert 500,000 16:12:24 16:18:53 00:06:29 Edit 500,000 16:20:17 16:32:09 00:11:52 Delete 500,000 16:32:51 16:42:02 00:09:11 Database Size: 390MB Development Environment Evaluation.doc Page 8 of 12 Issue No: 01

9 Test 2 Date 14/11/2001 Operation No. Records Start Finish Time Taken Insert 1,000,000 17:36:51 18:00:44 00:23:53 Edit 1,000,000 18:00:44 18:24:54 00:24:10 Delete 1,000,000 18:24:54 18:39:49 00:14:55 Database Size: 794MB Test 3 Date 20/11/2001 Operation No. Records Start Finish Time Taken Insert 2,000,000 09:48:44 10:06:12 00:17:28 Edit 2,000,000 10:06:12 10:36:03 00:29:51 Delete 2,000,000 10:36:03 10:55:28 00:19:25 Database Size: 1347MB These results indicate that a Delphi application using Opus DirectAccess can handle large volumes of data being processed as a batch. Development Environment Evaluation.doc Page 9 of 12 Issue No: 01

10 4 TurboPower AsyncPro 4.1 Introduction TurboPower s Async Professional is a collection of native Visual Component Library (VCL) components that provide serial communication facilities for programs created with Borland Delphi. It provides optimised components that are fully integrated with Delphi and compile directly into EXE files. Async Professional provides a wide range of serial communication components ranging from a simple COM port component, which is used to control the serial port hardware, to Voice Processing software. 4.2 Evaluation The Async Professional component collection is an excellent product with an incredibly good reputation among Delphi developers. The collection has won the Best Communications Tool in the Delphi Informant magazine Reader's Choice Awards for the past 5 years in a row ( ), and TurboPower have been named Company of the Year by the same magazine for the past 2 years. PMI have previously used these components on a project, which required us to communicate with several devices through serial ports, and we found them to be powerful, reliable, and easy to use. Development Environment Evaluation.doc Page 10 of 12 Issue No: 01

11 5 Conclusion In our opinion Powervote chose an excellent development tool when they chose Delphi as their programming tool. Delphi may not be the most popular development tool on the market, mainly because of Microsoft s commanding position in the software world, but its excellence has been recognised by all of the experts in Rapid Application Development, as the numerous awards it has won testify. Delphi is particularly powerful when developing GUI applications that access desktop databases, which is exactly what the IES system is. Powervote have additionally chosen well when they have needed to add to the basic Delphi Components. Opus DirectAccess has proven itself to be a fast and reliable interface to Microsoft Access from a Delphi application. It performed very well when we challenged it and passed all of our tests with flying colours. TurboPower s Async Professional component set is a tremendous product and is regarded the best available communications suite for Delphi. Development Environment Evaluation.doc Page 11 of 12 Issue No: 01

12 6 Revision History Revision Date Updated By Description A 14/12/01 Robert Doherty, Version 1 John Pugh Development Environment Evaluation.doc Page 12 of 12 Issue No: 01