Some progress…

I knew that Free Pascal (FP) differed from the Java environment I used to work in before my recent retirement. But it still took me some efforts to adapt. The main problem I had was using automated testing. FP has excellent tools for unit testing, like FPC which I use. However, unit testing requires the testing of only one component and not any related components. To do so in a Java world, you would use mocks or fakes. FP has no viable solution for mocks, so I used fakes. That did not work out. Fakes require the use of interfaces (object interfaces, not just the unit interfaces). And good solutions use Dependency Injection (DI), which is not available in FP but you can mimic it using the Factory pattern. I ended up with too many components, interfaces and fakes, to be maintainable. So I skipped Fakes, I skipped object interfaces (at least as a default approach), I skipped factories, and I ended up with nice clean objects. In Java you would call it a POJO: Plain Old Java Object, in Pascal that would probably be a POPO 🙂  )
That means I cannot always use unit testing in the strict sense. And obviously, I need to test as much as possible to get early feedback on any error I make and to prevent bugs. I used Integration tests for all back-end functionality. I use FPC to implement these tests, so technically they start as a unit test but the functionality is different. The integration tests work with a greenfield for the database which is populated before a range of tests start. This approach appears to be useful.
Finishing release 0.6 will still take a few months but I hope to have it available, including documentation, user manual and all tests at the start of 2020.