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

Handling the placement and sizing of components

One of the central topics about visual components is obviously how they are placed and arranged in the view. There are many different strategies available and, historically, many technologies (other than Delphi, I mean) have tried to address the problem to provide a placement and sizing strategy that fits well even when the surrounding environment (that is, the main container of the view – the window) changes in size or aspect ratio.

Several attempts have been made over the years, but we as developers are still struggling to achieve a truly visually responsive UI. Some approaches were code-based, trying to describe through code some model of the positioning/sizing of components that would dynamically adapt to changes at runtime. Some other approaches were event-driven, with many subsequent calculations to fit the whole set of components onto the available screen space. There are drawbacks to each approach, of course.

Delphi's...