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

Learning about the latest enhancements

The classic Pascal language rules have been followed in Delphi very closely—and that's a good thing, in my opinion. I remember stumbling through BASIC or JavaScript many times looking for the source of an error only to discover that a slight typo changed the name of a variable deep in a subroutine and subsequently lost the value I had been expecting. In Delphi, a mistake like that wouldn't even compile because identifiers have to be declared in a var or const section at the top of a method, or in a separate section of the class or unit. Some have decried this as old-fashioned and inconvenient, but with some IDE keyboard shortcuts and quick-setting bookmarks, any arguments for productivity loss have been removed.

Simplifying variable declaration

With Delphi 10.3 Rio, the declaration of local variables has been given a flexibility boost. You still have to declare them, but they no longer have to be declared in a separate var...