The EOS Library

About EOS

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About EOS:
In the Ancient Greece Eos was the goddess of the dawn. From her island home of Aiaia, in the river Okeanos, she rose up into the sky each morning in a golden chariot drawn by winged horses scattering the dark mists of the night with her rosy brilliance.
Out of mythology EOS is a general purpose library that allows easy XML serialization (marshalling) of Business Objects and its linking to the GUI using what we called the Modelbridge framework.
The EOS Library can be used to add automated xml persistence to complex object structures in Object Pascal. Aggregated objects (we call them weak objects) get stored together with the parent object. When the parent object is created from xml, the child object gets automatically created and loaded. There's more: associated objects (we call them strong objects) have a GOI (Global Object Identifier) associated to it. In complex object structures, where the same instance of a strong object are associated to different other objects, the instance is saved in xml only once, and the associations are marked using the GOI, so that, when recreating the structure from xml, the framework can restore the associations.
The library can be useful when in-memory objects are to be passed across a network: the in-memory representation can be trasformed in XML and the objects get cloned on the remote host. It can be handy for development of some kind of AJAX fashioned applications.
To be able to automate the xml serialization and deserialization the frameworks makes heavy use of the metadata information for published properties of pascal objects known as Run Time Type Information (RTTI).
The framework has been developed in Delphi and Kylix and then ported to Free Pascal and further development will continue only using this excellent free software compiler.

EOS Unit Testing

A particular emphasis is given to the quality of the libraries, with the building of unit tests even before actual coding using some eXtreme Programming ideas. A port of the core JUnit was made to be able to do unit testing as in Java. So this project gave birth to another useful framework, FPCUnit, now officially part of the Free Pascal FCL (Free Components Library). For an introduction to the FPCUnit framework you can read the simple but very clear tutorial written by Michael Van Canneyt that appeared on the Toolbox magazine and is now available online thanks to the courtesy of the Toolbox editor.