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 the TLine class

We're mentioning TLine here because, for a long time, Delphi developers had no simple way to draw a line on a form (with the standard components and without painting on the Canvas directly, of course). Now, you can simply drop a TLine on a form or frame and set its properties to achieve what you are looking for.

The Stroke and Fill properties are there to help you out with this! We covered them extensively in the previous section, so if you want to learn more, please take a look at that section.

Let's focus on three specific properties that were introduced by the TLine class:

  • LineType: This property deals with the fact that, like all TShape descendants, a TLine is actually placed like a rectangle, and you may want to determine where to put your line inside this rectangle. The values you can assign to this property are quite straightforward:
    • Bottom/Top/Left/Right: Use these values to draw the line on the corresponding...