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

Learning about TFormStand

This section is dedicated to TFrameStand, historically the first UI coordinator component I built, back in 2015. I've been showcasing TFrameStand at a number of in-person events, including conferences all around Europe (EKON and Delphi Code Camp in Germany, ITDevCon in Italy, PasCon and SDN events in the Netherlands, the DAPUG event in Denmark, and ZlotDelphi in Poland) and online webinars. I always get very good feedback from developers but also a recurring question: why support frames and not forms?

When I initially designed TFrameStand, I looked at frames for performance reasons, that is, on a mobile app having secondary forms had a performance hit (especially at creation time). Also, frames represent a smaller portion, suitable for UI reuse at a level way lower than whole-view size (think about floating panels, action buttons, and other common UI elements).

However, Embarcadero fixed the performance issues with secondary forms on mobile...