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

Chapter 5: Libraries, Packages, and Components

There's a joke listed as one of Murphy's computer laws that goes like this:

Any given program will expand to fill all the available memory.

Over the life of an application, customers demand more, operating systems get updated, new devices are supported, and so on. It is inevitable that useful software will grow in size and complexity over time.

Today's programs share code, call external services, and dynamically load resources in a variety of ways. Delphi has supported these techniques for a long time, but a refresher is in order, not only because it's more important than ever but also because there are some cross-platform considerations.

We'll start with the basics by simply pulling out procedures and functions into a Dynamically Loaded Library (DLL) that can be called from any language. Then, we'll move to working with packages and show you how to install your own custom components into Delphi...