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

Introduction to data binding

Once you have data available in some form (that is, datasets) and you are ready to build a UI-enabled application, you need to find a way to let the user consume this data, modify it through visual controls, and post changes to the original data source. This sounds simple at first, but finding a general approach to solving this problem elegantly and efficiently is far from trivial.

Data may differ in size, kind, or availability. Their visual controls greatly differ, as we have seen in earlier chapters, both in terms of their visual aspects and loading strategies/capabilities. Moreover, you may want to apply some transformations to the data before presenting it to the user (that is, formatting values) and apply some inverse transformation when storing it back in the data source.

Historically, Delphi has shined (and continues to do so today!) at being an effective tool for large data-driven applications, and every experienced Delphi developer should...