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

Mapping your way

Plotting coordinates on a map is where the usefulness of saved coordinate data really comes into play. This service also requires the permission of location services, but we covered that in the previous section so we don't need to address it again. However, viewing coordinates on a map introduces another layer of APIs, detailed as follows:

  • For iOS, the MapKit framework is ready to use, with no additional setup.
  • For Android, the Google Maps Android API requires a special API key you have to request through a Google account.

These are the only two platforms supported by Delphi's TMapView component.

Note

Not all devices based on Android support Google Maps. For example, Amazon Kindle Fire tablets use a variant of Android but provide their own Amazon Maps API; apps that try to access the Google Maps Android API on such devices will raise an error.

Since there's nothing extra to do for iOS devices, let's go straight to getting...