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 dataset persistence

At first, it may seem a bit strange to talk about dataset persistence within a data access component library. One might think data is in the database and you simply need to retrieve it, use it, and save it back. But there are a number of situations where these three basic steps get something in between that somehow interrupts this very simple cycle.

Nowadays, when systems are often distributed and your software solution may consist of some client applications (desktop, mobile, or web), one or more application servers (usually REST), and some final storage (still usually an RDBMS), you may find yourself in need of managing a dataset's life in not-so-classical ways.

Let's think about a client mobile application that retrieves data from the server and then has to work out of reach of the server itself. The chance to keep the dataset in memory is gone since mobile applications have their own lifecycle, usually managed by operating systems. Manually...