Book Image

Delphi Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Daniele Teti
Book Image

Delphi Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Daniele Teti

Overview of this book

Delphi is a cross-platform Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that supports rapid application development for Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X, Google Android, and Apple iOS. It helps you to concentrate on the real business and save yourself the pain of wandering amid GUI widget details, or having to tackle inter-platform incompatibilities. It also has a wide range of drag-and-drop controls, helping you code your business logic into your business model, and it compiles natively for desktop and mobile platforms. This book will teach you how to design and develop applications, deploy them on the cloud platform, and distribute them within an organization via Google Play and other similar platforms. You will begin with the basics of Delphi and get acquainted with JSON format strings, XSLT transformations, unicode encodings and various types of streams. We then move on to more advanced topics such as developing higher-order functions and using enumerators and RTTI. You will get an understanding of how Delphi RTL functions and how to use FireMonkey in a VCL application. We will then cover topics such as multithreading, using the parallel programming library and putting Delphi on a server. We will also take a look at the new feature of WebBroker Apache modules and then ride the mobile revolution with FireMonkey. By the end of the book, you will be able to develop and deploy cross-platform applications using Delphi .

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Delphi Cookbook - Second Edition
Daniele Teti
Jun, 2016 | 470 pages
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Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Delphi Cookbook Second Edition
Delphi Cookbook Second Edition
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
About the Reviewer
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Delphi Basics
Delphi Basics
Introduction
Changing your application look and feel with VCL styles and no code
Changing the style of your VCL application at runtime
Customizing TDBGrid
Using owner draw combos and listboxes
Making an owner draw control aware of the VCL styles
Creating a stack of embedded forms
Manipulating JSON
Manipulating and transforming XML documents
I/O in the 21st century – knowing the streams
Creating a Windows service
Associating a file extension with your application on Windows
Be coherent with the Windows look and feel using TTaskDialog
2
Becoming a Delphi Language Ninja
Becoming a Delphi Language Ninja
Introduction
Fun with anonymous methods – using higher-order functions
Writing enumerable types
RTTI to the rescue – configuring your class at runtime
Duck typing using RTTI
Creating helpers for your classes
3
Knowing Your Friends – the Delphi RTL
Knowing Your Friends – the Delphi RTL
Introduction
Check strings with regular expressions
Consuming RESTful services using native HTTP(S) client libraries
Cope with the encoded Internet world using System.NetEncodings
Save space using System.Zip
Decouple your code using a cross-platform publish/subscribe mechanism
4
Going Cross-Platform with FireMonkey
Going Cross-Platform with FireMonkey
Introduction
Giving a new appearance to the standard FireMonkey controls using styles
Creating a styled TListBox
Impressing your clients with animations
Using master/details with LiveBindings
Showing complex vector shapes using paths
Using FireMonkey in a VCL application
Reinventing your GUI also known as mastering Firemonkey controls, shapes, and effects
5
The Thousand Faces of Multithreading
The Thousand Faces of Multithreading
Introduction
Synchronizing shared resources with TMonitor
Talking with the main thread using a thread-safe queue
Synchronizing multiple threads using TEvent
Displaying a measure on a 2D graph like an oscilloscope
Using tasks to make your customer happier
Monitoring things using futures
Parallelize using the parallel for
6
Putting Delphi on the Server
Putting Delphi on the Server
Introduction
Developing web client JavaScript applications with WebBroker on the server
Converting a console application to a Windows service
Serializing a dataset to JSON and back
Serializing objects to JSON and back using RTTI
Sending a POST HTTP request encoding parameters
Implementing a RESTful interface using WebBroker
Controlling remote application using UDP
Using app tethering to create a companion app
Creating DataSnap Apache modules
Creating WebBroker Apache modules
Using native HTTP(S) client libraries
7
Riding the Mobile Revolution with FireMonkey
Riding the Mobile Revolution with FireMonkey
Introduction
Taking a photo, applying effects, and sharing it
Using TListView to show and search local data
Using SQLite databases to handle a to-do list
Do not block the main thread!
Using a styled TListView to handle long lists of data
Customizing the TListView
Taking a photo and location and sending it to a server continuously
Talking with the backend
Making a phone call from your app!
Tracking the application's lifecycle
8
Using Specific Platform Features
Using Specific Platform Features
Introduction
Using Android SDK Java classes
Using iOS Objective C SDK classes
Displaying PDF files in your app
Sending Android Intents
Letting your phone talk – using the Android TextToSpeech engine
Using Java classes in Android apps with Java2OP
Doing it in the background, the right way – Android services
Index
Index

Serializing a dataset to JSON and back

At the time when almost all the Delphi program was client/server or, in general, when the Delphi program was always connected to the database server in a fully-connected scenario, dataset serialization was a niche topic. There were really only a few situations where you really needed this kind of functionality in the core of your application. Were the '90! Now, however, making your data available to other programs or getting data from other software running somewhere in the world is the norm. In some cases, the other "programs" are not written in Delphi, so the DataSet.SaveToFile method, or another serialization that uses a proprietary or "exotic" format, is no longer enough.

Let's say we have a JavaScript frontend for our Delphi application server. Your data should be deDelphized (I've just coined this word) and should be independent from the backend programming language or framework used. Delphi has a lot of serialization facilities, but there isn...

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