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)

Mixing 3D and 2D

In FireMonkey, you can mix 2D with 3D. In a 3D form we can use 2-dimensional user interface controls, or we can embed the special TViewport3D component in a standard FireMonkey 2D form to do some 3D rendering.

In this example, we are going to add some special visual effects by building a 2D user interface in 3D space. This will allow the user to interact with the app in a traditional way, but we could do some extra things like rotating or moving the whole user interface in 3D space for a surprising user experience.

Create a new multi-device Delphi project and select Blank Application as the application type. Save the main form's unit as uFormTwistMe and the whole app as TwistMe. Change the Name property of the form to FormTwistMe. Drop the TViewport3D component on the form and align it to Client.

On the Tool Palette, we can find the 3D Layers category with...