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

Distributing the final product

Here we are! The final piece of the journey to developing cross-platform applications is to actually get them deployed to your end users for which they were designed.

If you're familiar with distributing Windows applications, you've probably used an installation building program such as InstallAware or InstallShield to create a self-contained program that extracts itself, asks the user a few questions (such as where to install), creates the destination folder with your app inside, and adds a shortcut icon to either the desktop or the Start menu—or both. My favorite install builder for these types of apps is Inno Setup. This is a widely used free tool and I have not come across any Windows installation task it cannot handle.

Deploying application servers is different than end user apps. Servers are often installed by skilled IT people that set up firewalls, redirect ports, and manage user permissions—they usually prefer to...