Book Image

Expert Delphi

By : Paweł Głowacki
Book Image

Expert Delphi

By: Paweł Głowacki

Overview of this book

Delphi is the most powerful Object Pascal IDE and component library for cross-platform native app development. It enables building natively compiled, blazingly fast apps for all major platforms including Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, and Linux. If you want to build server-side applications, create web services, and have clear GUIs for your project, then this book is for you. The book begins with a basic primer on Delphi helping you get accustomed to the IDE and the Object Pascal language and will then quickly move on to advanced-level concepts. Through this book, we’ll help you understand the architecture of applications and will teach you the important concepts of the FireMonkey library, show you how to build server-side services, and enable you to interact with the Internet of Things. Towards the end, you will learn to integrate your app with various web services and deploy them. By the end of the book, you will be able to build powerful, cross-platform, native apps for iOS and Android with a single code base.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Moving Earth

We are going to start with something simple and create an interactive 3D visualization of the rotating Earth in deep space. To make it interactive, we will implement a 3D touch event to move Earth closer and further from the viewer. This first example will be as minimal as possible to demonstrate how quickly you can build a 3D app with FireMonkey.

Create a new Delphi multi-device project and select 3D Application as the application type. Save the form unit as uFormEarth and the project as MovingEarth. Change the Name property of the form to FormEarth and its Color to Black.

The next step is to add a TDummy component to the form. This component acts as a container for other 3D components and is very useful for applying common transformations to a group of 3D objects. It does not have any visual representation at runtime. In the FireMonkey 2D world, the TLayout component...