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

Updating data on a mobile device

Now that you have a database on your mobile device, we will mention some of the techniques you can use to edit and save data as there are a few differences from desktop-based applications.

First, you're probably accustomed to presenting a screen filled with edit fields and allowing the customer to click OK or Cancel to decide whether to keep the changes they've made or discard them all. Mobile device users expect everything to always be saved automatically. In fact, the Apple guidelines for app design encourage fluidity to help users interact with their devices in a smooth and seamless manner; stopping to ask for confirmation should only be done when essential to prevent the loss of data or to alert the user to an important notice or decision to be made. For example, a point-of-sale application should allow a receipt-in-progress to be tendered or canceled, depending on the customer's choice to proceed with the purchase, but a change...