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

Summary

In this chapter, we learned how to modularize your FMX applications using TFrameStand. The capabilities of this little component are very effective at splitting the application into more manageable units. At the same time, it promotes the reuse of UI elements and visual conventions with a positive impact on the overall user experience and maintainability of the project. So it is a good addition both from the user and the developer/project manager point of view.

We have learned how to split our application into views, following the natural flow of the user experience. On mobile platforms, applications work very close to state machines where each state is a different view and transitions are driven by actions accessible in the current view. With TFrameStand, it is easy to implement loosely coupled views and bind them together to build up the application as a whole. Add-ons such as animations and visual continuity elements are also at hand. Therefore, the developer will be able...