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

Working with various screen sizes

The first thing you probably noticed when working with the ClientList app we used in the previous section is that Delphi's design-time view shows a master list of people on the left and a Detail view of a single person on the right. This is the standard desktop interface and was how both the Windows and Mac desktop applications looked. However, when we deploy the app to a mobile device in portrait mode, the master list disappears and all you see is a button at the upper left of the screen that, when clicked, reveals the master list in a slide-out list over the detail, allowing you to scroll and select a different person, after which it hides again.

How does the app look and behave differently on a smaller screen?

Exploring target views

Before I answer that, look at the right side of the toolbar at top of the design view for the ClientList project. There's a combo box labeled View, and if you drop down the list, you'll see the...