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)

Previewing forms on devices

Delphi Form Designer gives us the what you see is what you get functionality, but we can go one step further and use Delphi built-in functionality to preview the form we are designing live on a physical device. For this we will have to download a special mobile app published by Embarcadero Technologies called FireUI App Preview. It is available from both Apple App Store and Google Play Store. Refer to the following screenshot:

With the FireUI App Preview app you can preview an app as you are designing it live on a physical device. All changes made in the Form Designer are broadcasted to connected devices in real time. This app uses App Tethering technology available in Delphi, where arbitrary apps written in either Delphi or C++Builder, desktop or mobile, can communicate with each other over a Wi-Fi network or using Bluetooth. In this scenario, Delphi...