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

Understanding the library's composition

The following diagram (source: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/rad-studio/firedac) summarizes the architecture of the FireDAC library and you can clearly see how the library is layered, that is, on the top, there are FMX and VCL applications, using the library to implement data access and management:

Figure 5.1

As you can see, at the bottom, there are the DBMS client libraries (provided by each vendor and part of the DBMS software itself) and in the middle, there is FireDAC, itself layered from drivers (physical or bridging) to interface with the DBMS client libraries up to the higher-level components (non-visible and visible).

The most important and most used components, such as those implementing a database connection, transaction handling, SQL execution, and result-set fetching, are all situated in the Non Visible Components (Comp) layer and take advantage of capabilities and functionalities implemented in the underlying layers...