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

Configuring for a wide audience

As you've been working with your own local databases, you know right where everything is and it's been quick and easy to just set the database connection string directly. But your users will install your software in different folders or on older operating systems that have different default paths. Hardcoding a connection string with a path and port is always a setup for problems.

We have not addressed this throughout the book as we've been focusing on other concepts but as we look toward distributing our servers and apps to other systems, we have to take this into consideration and allow flexibility in where files and databases will be and which ports may or may not be available.

Enter configuration settings. There are many approaches to how and where to store these. Some apps create a small database file in a publicly accessible area of the local device. Others store settings in the Windows registry. Since the Windows registry is...