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

Learning about components

We can think of a UI as a set of components put together to build a visual unit that the user can interact with to perform some task or get some information.

The components are the building blocks of our UI, and FMX (and VCL as well) has plenty of components (usually a bit complicated). Let's start with three very common components – TLabel, TEdit, and TButton. The following diagram will help you consider the position of these three classes in the general Delphi component hierarchy, for the FMX version:

Figure 2.6

At the same time, these three classes have a corresponding version in VCL, and the following diagram provides a representation of the significant portion of the VCL class hierarchy around TEdit, TButton, and TLabel:

Figure 2.7

You can see, in Figure 2.6 and Figure 2.7, the class hierarchy structures for FMX and VCL. For convenience, we can assume TComponent as the root class and you can easily spot some homonyms...