Book Image

Delphi GUI Programming with FireMonkey

By : Magni
4 (1)
Book Image

Delphi GUI Programming with FireMonkey

4 (1)
By: 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

Managing dialog forms

Dialogs are very popular functionality. Many applications rely on dialogs to present the user with some content.

In this section, we will look at dialogs and how to properly use them in modern applications. One of the biggest differences is about their modality, that is, an experienced developer may expect their code to hold until a dialog is on the screen while in a modern application (on a mobile platform, for example), dialogs follow an async pattern, by default.

There are many different dialog types, ranging from the simplest ones that are used to provide a simple text message, to more complex dialogs such as selecting a file from the filesystem. Many functionalities pass through dialogs as they are a natural way to interact with the user to inform them or to fetch some value needed by the current operation.

Nonetheless, dialogs in a multi-platform context can be tricky to handle. First of all, some of the dialogs are actually provided by the underlying...