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 message definitions as data types

In the System.Messaging unit, you can find some base definitions such as TMessageBase, TMessage<T>, and TObjectMessage<T>. The type of the message is a crucial point of this mechanism as you can send a message of a certain type X, you will subscribe to a message by its type X, and the message handler will probably need to know details of the message content (tied to its type X, or T if you are using TMessage<T>).

If you simply need to define a new kind of event, you may want to define a type and inherit your type, TEventX, from TMessageBase:

  TEventX = class(TMessageBase);

The type definition is unique in the type system so it can be used as a key to bind a listener to that specific type.

Moreover, if you need to carry some values within the message, you may want to make your type more complex, adding properties and/or constructors to initialize them.

Beware that memory management follows the standard rules for object...