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

Delphi 10.4 on the Windows platform will be the starting point for building our apps and prototyping, but talking about the key points of deploying to mobile devices will be our main focus. Additionally, some discussion and code examples will involve SQL, the Structured Query Language that's used by modern databases, and familiarity with it will be assumed.

This chapter discusses two different databases: InterBase and SQLite. SQLite is free and open source and is supported on every platform. InterBase's embedded editions (IBLite and IBToGo) are geared for mobile platforms, and either can be used depending on the license you have. When developing and testing from Delphi in Windows, an InterBase server needs to be running – the Developer Edition that comes with Delphi serves this purpose. The Mac desktop will not be used in this chapter.

The code for the two projects we will cover in this chapter can be found on GitHub at the following URL...