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)

XML

Before JSON dominated the world, XML was the most popular format for data interchange. With the addition of many new specifications, XML became very complex, but it is a practical thing to understand how to process XML in case you need to.

XML processing in Delphi is based on building an in-memory representation of the XML file using XML parsers from different vendors. The key component for working with XML is TXMLDocument. XML parsing is considerably more difficult then JSON. TXMLDocument has a pluggable XML parser architecture and Delphi comes with a number of XML parser implementations from different vendors. There are different vendor implementations available depending on the target platform. Take a look at the following screenshot:

Let's have a look at how to implement writing and reading XML information from a file. In the New Items dialog, there is the Web...