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

Turning a package into a component

Let's continue working with the HideString example and turn it into a component that gets installed on Delphi's Tool Palette. First, we'll copy and rename the demo project and package over to a new set of folders. Then, we'll use the New Component wizard to create an empty design-time package that gets registered in Delphi as a component and brings in our runtime package. Finally, we'll add some properties and expand the HideString function to be a little more useful and make it easy to configure. Each step is detailed in the following sections.

For reference through these steps, here are the project filenames I will use (everything will be in the same folder for simplicity):

  • HideStringComponentDemo.dpr: FireMonkey demo application (renamed)
  • HideStringRT.dpk: Runtime package (renamed from HideStringPkg)
  • HideStringDT.dpk: Design-time package (new)

Let's dive in!

Creating our first component...