One of the projects I'm working on involves a module that needs to allow end users to create what essentially equates to, their own "object classes," storing data structures / record types that they can design and modify at runtime. The users will also be able to customize the user interface considerably, but that is not so much the scope of this question.
The closest example to what we are striving to build with this functionality, that I've seen, would be something very akin to what InstantObjects provides at design time, except our system would provide it at runtime, and put the class design control in the hands of the end-user (who will generally be pretty technically sophisticated, obviously).
I recently came across this list of Object Persistence Frameworks for Delphi Win32:
http://tdelphihobbyist.blogspot.com/2008/01/win32-object-persistence-frameworks.html
Any recommendations as to which of these might be the most conducive to the kind of runtime flexibility we are trying to create?
Best Answer
There is currently ongoing discussion of this in the tiopf newsgroups. Tiopf is a open source object persistence framework. Currently it doesn't support user modifiable objects but it looks like someone will be adding this functionality shortly.
Main site: http://tiopf.sourceforge.net/ News groups: See http://tiopf.sourceforge.net/Support.shtml
See "tiOPF ad runtime modifications" thread in the support newsgroup.