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

Approaching the TStyleBook component

In this section, we are going to discuss how style definitions can be stored, embedded, and manipulated both at design time and runtime.

The StyleBook component has exactly this aim. It is a non-visual component you usually drop onto a form and edit through its component editor (double-click on the component to activate it), that is, the Style Designer we have seen previously. All functionalities related to style persistence (load/save from/to a file) are available at design time and at runtime. If you load one or more styles in TStyleBook at design time, data will be stored within the FMX file of the form the component is on. Keep in mind that styles (especially bitmap styles) can be large in size and they actually get compiled into the binaries of your application.

Every FMX form has a StyleBook property that you can use to instruct the style selection mechanism to look up in a specific StyleBook when looking for style definitions of components on...