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

Understanding the thread safety of UI frameworks

The most popular UI frameworks out there (including VCL and FMX) are not thread-safe.

Thread safety is the ability something (like a piece of code, a library, a framework, or something else) has to properly work in a context where multiple concurrent threads are involved. Properly work here means having no runtime errors, memory leaks, memory overwriting, and so on. It does not mean it is the most efficient way to accomplish the task.

Everything is run in a single thread that will be the owner of all UI objects and the executor of all UI-related tasks. The reason is that a thread-safe UI environment would likely require a lot of synchronization. Synchronization is what is needed to avoid collisions while dealing with the same object and multiple threads. There are a number of techniques related to synchronization but, to get the concept, we can consider one of the simplest forms of synchronization.

When a resource is (or has to be) shared...