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

Remembering Delphi's Pascal roots

Some have pointed to the fact that Delphi—being based on Pascal, which was designed as a teaching language—is too simple to be a contender in today's complex programming environments. But nothing could be further from the truth. The extensions added to the language and the associated runtime library make it just as powerful as any other high-level, compiled programming language. In fact, the readability of this language and its strongly typed, structured design lends itself well to code that is easy to maintain and upgrade. It's object-oriented, compiles quickly, uses libraries and packages for modularity, and has a variety of frameworks to provide platform and device flexibility.

The Pascal syntax is often used in pseudocode for its universal readability. Instead of curly braces to define blocks (as in C# or JavaScript), Delphi uses begin-end. Instead of -lt or -gt, as in PowerShell, it uses less-than and greater-than...