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

Sending messages through the message manager

Once you have defined your message types, you'll need to create messages and give them to an entity that will take care of passing them to the current subscribers. This entity is called TMessageManager and the RTL has a singleton instance acting as the default manager. Most of the time, I tend to use the default manager to drive my custom messages too; however, you are free to define and instantiate your own TMessageManager instance (or instance of a descendant class you may want to define).

TMessageManager exposes two relevant methods—SendMessage and SubscribeToMessage.

In this section, we'll focus on the SendMessage method and, in the next section, we'll have a close look at the latter.

The SendMessage method will add a new message to the dispatching system. Actually there is not a queue of messages, that is, the mechanism is synchronous. So when you send a message, what you are actually doing is asking the dispatching...