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

Summary

The small demo at the start of this chapter packed a lot into it: a variety of 3D objects with techniques used to color, texture, and animate them; an area for 2D controls, a little interactivity, and some considerations when using it on various platforms.

These are great to get started, but to really learn the nuances of 3D programming and how humans interact with virtual objects, putting together a game reveals things you may not have considered. The escape game we wrote showcased many of those aspects, such as when and how to set the Position.Z property to work with controls at design time, how rotating an object on one axis affects the position and rotation along other axes, how to tastefully mix 2D and 3D objects for the best interactivity, how lights and colors can greatly enhance visual appeal, or when to disable HitTest to allow a click event to pass through to a parent control.

When working with 3D objects on mobile devices, it's important to remember there...