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

Growing a language

Delphi is not a stagnant language—it continues to grow and evolve. Sometimes, these changes are evolutionary, while sometimes they add optional functionality. Once in a while, they cause disruption when upgrading your code, but it has surprisingly good backward compatibility.

These extensions started with the earliest versions of Turbo Pascal, the precursor to Delphi back in the 1980s.

Adding objects to Pascal

In 1989, Turbo Pascal 5.5 was released. It was this historical upgrade that took Borland's extension of Pascal from a structured language to the object-oriented arena. A completely separate manual was provided just to educate developers about the concepts of object-oriented programming:

Figure 3.1 – Turbo Pascal's object-oriented guide

This laid the groundwork for class inheritance, encapsulation of data and functionality in objects that limit access to private fields through published properties, and...