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

Waiting for a task to complete

Assume that we have a task reference (ITask) and we want to wait (synchronously) for its completion before proceeding further.

The ITask.Wait method is provided exactly for this purpose. It also accepts an argument for the desired timeout, making it very easy to fine-tune the operation. The following code shows the ITask.Wait method:

var
LTask: ITask;
begin
LTask := TTask.Run(
procedure
begin
Sleep(5000); // Do something...
end
);

LTask.Wait();
// Completed
end;

In the previous code, assuming that we are running this code in the main/UI thread, the expected behavior here is that the task will run in the background, and the main/UI thread will synchronously wait for the task completion. Obviously, especially if the task is not immediate, this will block the main/UI thread so this is not a good practice to achieve responsiveness.

The following code shows how we can try to avoid blocking the main/UI thread for the whole execution...