Delphi 13 Florence and MARS-Curiosity

Embarcadero Technologies released Delphi 13 Florence (the new major version of Delphi and RAD Studio) yesterday, September 10th, 2025.

Thanks to the contribution to MARS open source project by Carlo Barazzetta, MARS has now an updated installer supporting Delphi 13 so I’ve decided to release a new version of MARS-Curiosity REST Library: v.1.6.

MARS Version 1.6 includes a bunch of new functionalities and fixes but there is a interesting new feature coming with Delphi 13 availability.

The new Delphi version (D13) has several new features (including a new ternary operator in the Delphi language). Among the new features there is a significant addition to WebBroker technology that can now (easily) implement FCGI applications. This opens the way to a new deployment modality for MARS-Curiosity REST server applications: FCGI to be bounded to nginx or Apache web servers.

This means that when you’ll bootstrap your next MARS server project through the MARSCmd utility, you’ll get a project group with a new entry: the <YourProjectNameHere>FCGI project.

It really behaves like the MARSTemplateServerConsoleApplication option but with the new WebBroker implementation for FCGI support.

Once you have it up and running, you can use nginx to expose the MARS REST server through the nginx http/https interface.

This is a simple example of the configuration fragment to be included in your nginx.conf file:

        location ~ ^/fcgi(.*)$ {
            include fastcgi_params;
            fastcgi_param SCRIPT_NAME /fcgi;
            fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $1;
            fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME dummy;
            fastcgi_param PATH_TRANSLATED $document_root$1;
            fastcgi_keep_conn on;
            fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
        }

That’s it! Your MARS REST server application is now served through nginx web server and FCGI interface (still http/https for the client, of course).

I am very happy to see this new Delphi 13 release rolling out and also that WebBroker (the underlying Embarcadero technology MARS uses for some of its deployment options) to receive a significant update. Also, I am pleased to see my OSS project is receiving more and more contributions over time.

Sincerely,

Andrea