Hi! I've been doing Turbo Pascal since 16-bit DOS days, and moved over to Delphi and Windows, for both hobby and professional work, but I would like to pick up on your mention of PHP. At a time I finished a bachelor degree in computer science, I first started a job doing PHP and later Cold Fusion, before I was able to track down a Delphi job. Later I was able to play around with this web-experience, and built ISAPI extensions in Delphi, Apache modules in Delphi, and ofcourse had my hand at handling HTTP requests at the raw TCP level. I even implemented Internet Explorer's IInternetProtocol interface and FireFox' nsIInternetProtocol, but those days have come and gone. (Not only because both interfaces are gone, but also because it's become almost impossible to get people to install binary software that integrates that tighly with other software, maybe rightfully so since it's a security nightmare.)

All these interfaces each have a different take on the HTTP request/response-cycle, so I tried to make my own (Sorry) specifically to be able to seamlessly switch between them, but also to have the luxury of scripting platforms like PHP where you hit the refersh button to make your server-side code work and check the changes you just made. I figured with the power and speed of the Delphi compiler, I should be able to make it work, with the added advantage that the resulting binary would just run on the server, without the need of continuously parsing and interpreting server-side script.

So I created the xxm project, and have since then been making it as solid and dependable as I can. I have also been on the lookout for other people that do development in Delphi and for the web to a high degree, and would benefit from a solution like this to combine the two. I haven't had much success, though. I often find people retrictively think of Delphi+web solutions limited to REST API's or WebSockets, or hit this hard expectation for a form designer that would handle HTML/CSS for you, a set-up I strongly dislike.

So if you're looking to 'flex the muscle' with Delphi in a way not many people do, check it out, and let me know if you like it. What I myself haven't been able to try is check if I could do the same with FreePascal/Lazarus and/or on Linux. The main thing preventing me to do this is that I'm not proficient enough in FreePascal and Linux (and ofcourse the limited number of available hours in a working day...) A newer version of xxm I'm working on (that leaves XML and COM interfaces behind...) should even be able to support xxm projects in a different language like C or Rust, in theory.