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

Chapter 10: Cameras, the GPS, and More

In this chapter, we'll look specifically at smartphone features, such as accessing the built-in camera, utilizing location and mapping services, and sharing data with other applications.

There are several sample projects available from Embarcadero that come with Delphi or can be downloaded via the GetIt Package Manager. We will not cover these specifically but will build our own app throughout this chapter that takes code from these projects and puts them together in a fun, park-visiting app.

The idea for this app will be that we want to build a list of all the parks in our neighborhood, take pictures, and save their locations to a small database. You can easily tweak this app to apply to museums or clients or whatever you want—or even a combination of these by adding a category. This will be a thorough introduction to accessing mobile app services.

We'll keep it simple, building it through the following sections:

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