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 multi-platform visual programming

There are a number of peculiarities in the UI that are intrinsic to the specific execution platform. A Windows application and an OS X/macOS application may have the same functionalities but have a different user interface. They wouldn't necessarily have a completely different UI; just keep in mind that every platform has its own conventions and look and feel particularities that you need to respect if you want to provide a UI the user feels is natural in the overall picture of the operating system (OS) they are acquainted with. This will greatly impact the user-friendliness of the application.

FireMonkey's promise is to let you build a UI application that is cross-platform, meaning the same application will be deployed on several platforms without having the very same aspect on each of them. The application will be transposed into the specific look and feel of each platform without requiring a complete rewrite of the application...