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

Summary

In this chapter, we have seen how to effectively use some very important components of the FMX framework: list controls, tree views, grids, and multi views. These components are very common in most applications and are the key building blocks of your UIs. Some of them are very rich in functionalities and provide a high level of customization opportunities and it is very important that you have a general understanding of how they work and what functionalities are available in order to build effective and rich UIs for your applications.

At the same time, having good knowledge of the individual building blocks is generally not enough to deliver a decent user experience. The upcoming chapters will focus on several traversal aspects of programming with FMX.

The next chapter will cover FireDAC, the data access component library included in Delphi since the XE3 version, covering basic concepts and typical usage in FMX applications.

We'll discuss another important topic, in...