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

Setting up a 3D viewport

Now that we have had our first contact with the FMX TForm3D class, we can quickly introduce the second available way to add 3D capabilities to an FMX application. Many use cases for 3D-enabled (business) applications implies you have a regular (2D) UI that you want to enrich with some 3D graphics. For instance, you may want to use a region of your 2D UI to render a 3D scene.

The TViewport3D component acts as a container for 3D objects. You can place this container wherever in your 2D FMX UI, as you would do with a normal TLayout component. You can find the TViewport3D component under the Viewports category of the IDE component palette, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 13.6

As you can see from the preceding screenshot, the TViewport3D component inherits from the FMX.Controls.TControl class and implements the FMX.Controls3D.IViewport3D interface (the same interface supported by TForm3D). It encapsulates a TContext3D ...