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

Moving to FireMonkey from the VCL

For many years, the only GUI development platform that came with Delphi was the VCL, or Visual Component Library. The VCL is powerful and mature but is so entrenched with Windows-specific API calls that it is not practical to turn it into something else. Instead, VGScene, a cross-platform library designed by Eugene Kryukov of KSDev, was acquired in 2011, rebranded as FireMonkey, and added to Delphi XE2. And now, many iterations later, it is the foundation for all cross-platform GUI applications in Delphi.

All Mac, iOS, and Android GUI development in Delphi uses the FireMonkey framework. Windows has the option to use either FireMonkey or the VCL. So, if you're familiar with the VCL, the first step toward understanding cross-platform GUI development is to switch your Windows application development to use FireMonkey. This first section will lead you through that step.

Starting a new Windows FireMonkey project

Starting a new FireMonkey...