Book Image

Fearless Cross-Platform Development with Delphi

By : David Cornelius
Book Image

Fearless Cross-Platform Development with Delphi

By: David Cornelius

Overview of this book

Delphi is a strongly typed, event-driven programming language with a rich ecosystem of frameworks and support tools. It comes with an extensive set of web and database libraries for rapid application development on desktop, mobile, and internet-enabled devices. This book will help you keep up with the latest IDE features and provide a sound foundation of project management and recent language enhancements to take your productivity to the next level. You’ll discover how simple it is to support popular mobile device features such as sensors, cameras, and GPS. The book will help you feel comfortable working with FireMonkey and styles and incorporating 3D user interfaces in new ways. As you advance, you’ll be able to build cross-platform solutions that not only look native but also take advantage of a wide array of device capabilities. You’ll also learn how to use embedded databases, such as SQLite and InterBase ToGo, synchronizing them with your own custom backend servers or modules using the powerful RAD Server engine. The book concludes by sharing tips for testing and deploying your end-to-end application suite for a smooth user experience. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to deliver modern enterprise applications using Delphi confidently.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Section 1: Programming Power
5
Section 2: Cross-Platform Power
11
Section 3: Mobile Power
15
Section 4: Server Power

Technical requirements

This chapter will show how to build 3D applications that run on different platforms and how the FireMonkey framework gets you there. The examples will be able to be run on Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS devices. As always, a Windows computer running Delphi 10.4 will be the minimum requirement—it is up to you to decide which other platforms to use for personal education and testing.

In addition to standard Delphi requirements, the 3D components discussed in this chapter utilize the following advanced capabilities of the GPU engines expected to be available:

  • DirectX on Windows
  • OpenGL or Metal on Mac OS X
  • OpenGL for Embedded Systems (OpenGL ES) on iOS and Android

    Note

    While OpenGL is still the default API used by FireMonkey on the Mac at the time of writing, support for the Metal engine was added in Delphi 10.4 Sydney and may someday be the default. Follow the Boost Mac performance with Metal and Delphi 10.4 link in the Further reading section...