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

Putting code into packages

Runtime packages are another way to share code and are used far more frequently than dynamic libraries as these are available on all platforms and are the basis of components—which we will cover in the next section. Packages are simpler to write than dynamic libraries because they don't have the parameter-passing issues to worry about, and functions and objects can be called and passed around just as if the code were part of the project. But they can only be used by Delphi packages and applications written in the same version of Delphi that is used to compile the package.

Note

You also need to know how to write packages to use RAD Server (Enterprise or Architect edition).

Let's turn our HideString library into a package. This actually involves taking out some of the scaffolding code we put in to support a dynamic library. In fact, when we're done, it simply looks like a collection of used units we'd link directly in the...