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

Getting familiar with what's included

RAD Server is all about saving you lots of time. It comes ready to run and ready to deploy! For developers, it's installed with Delphi, and for deploying to customers, you can download packages from GetIt to automate most of the steps.

Let's go over what comes pre-installed with Delphi.

Running RAD Server on a development environment

RAD Server is comprised of two parts:

  • The engine, listening for requests and returning JSON data
  • The console, a web server app

The engine provides application endpoints for accessing both built-in and extended functionality through packages that are installed. The console makes requests to the engine and presents a nice web view of your application resources and usage statistics.

There are both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of both of these applications residing in the bin and bin64 folders of your Delphi installation, respectively. To start the RAD Server engine, simply...