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 FireDAC library

In this section, we are going to discuss FireDAC, the data access library shipped with Delphi. We'll discuss the general architecture as well as some key points that make this library very effective for every Delphi developer.

There are many things I love about FireDAC, and they are as follows:

  • It is a well-designed library, with a neat separation across functions, classes, and component layers; given this separation and another kind of separation, across functionalities, you can pick what you need and leave the rest out of your applications.
  • The base concept of this DAC library is to provide access to a wide variety of database servers through the same programming interface, with a non-limiting approach that enables cross-database system programming as well as direct access to each system's peculiar features.
  • It enables high-level features (such as in-memory datasets, filters, grouping, local SQL, persistence, macros, array DML, fetching...