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 .
Table of Contents (10 chapters)
9
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...