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

Implementing views

We are modeling our application as a finite state machine where states are tied with corresponding views. The main form will be responsible for orchestrating the views in front of the user and will make use of TFrameStand to manage this task.

Views are built using TFrame descendants, one for each view (in more complex scenarios, you may want to have hierarchies of TFrame descendants or compose them as needed).

As a general note, you can create a new frame in the IDE by selecting the File | New | Other | Individual files | FireMonkey frame.

You may want to customize the rapid entries in the File | New menu, through the available Customize entry, in order to shorten the operation.

The following screenshot shows the IDE New Items dialog with the FireMonkey Frame entry selected:

Figure 8.6

I tend to follow this naming convention for frames/forms, such that each frame has its own unit with a uniform name, that is, TFooFrameFrames.Foo.pas. Remember...