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

Introducing the TThread class

The TThread class (unit System.Classes) is a wrapper around the concept of the thread object. The idea is you can inherit your own class using the TThread class as a parent and then provide a custom implementation of the Execute method. The code you put in the Execute method will be executed in a separate thread. You only need to create an instance of your new class and start it by using the TThread.Start method.

Shared resources are always problematic when it comes to parallel (multi-threaded) programming. A common scenario is to define your TThread inherited class, onboarding all necessary data as class members (fields or properties). Before starting the thread (yet after creating the instance), you need a chance to provide values for these fields or properties.

The running thread will make use of these values without worrying about concurrency issues or synchronization requirements. Obviously, this is easy to do for primitive...