Book Image

Delphi GUI Programming with FireMonkey

By : Andrea Magni
4 (1)
Book Image

Delphi GUI Programming with FireMonkey

4 (1)
By: Andrea Magni

Overview of this book

FireMonkey (FMX) is a cross-platform application framework that allows developers to create exciting user interfaces and deliver applications on multiple operating systems (OS). This book will help you learn visual programming with Delphi and FMX. Starting with an overview of the FMX framework, including a general discussion of the underlying philosophy and approach, you’ll then move on to the fundamentals and architectural details of FMX. You’ll also cover a significant comparison between Delphi and the Visual Component Library (VCL). Next, you’ll focus on the main FMX components, data access/data binding, and style concepts, in addition to understanding how to deliver visually responsive UIs. To address modern application development, the book takes you through topics such as animations and effects, and provides you with a general introduction to parallel programming, specifically targeting UI-related aspects, including application responsiveness. Later, you’ll explore the most important cross-platform services in the FMX framework, which are essential for delivering your application on multiple platforms while retaining the single codebase approach. Finally, you’ll learn about FMX’s built-in 3D functionalities. By the end of this book, you’ll be familiar with the FMX framework and be able to build effective cross-platform apps.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Delphi GUI Programming Frameworks
4
Section 2: The FMX Framework in Depth
13
Section 3: Pushing to The Top: Advanced Topics

Exploring TFrameStand – Hello, World!

Keeping as a background what we have discussed so far in this chapter, we'll now explore some functionalities built into the TFrameStand component. As you may have noticed, the problem we are addressing (finding an efficient strategy for building a usable application) is very general and the mechanisms provided by TFrameStand are also quite general. So, there are multiple uses of the component each developer may consider from time to time.

In this section, we'll cover some standard use cases, showcasing how TFrameStand functionalities and related mechanisms help in dividing the whole program into modules that are easier to design and maintain. The proposed approach also makes use of data modules, which is a very native concept in the Delphi development environment, around for decades.

Typically, you'll drop a TFrameStand component on a TForm descendant. Following our model of the mobile app based on the finite state...