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

Coding your own LiveBindings methods

For this last section on LiveBindings, we'll continue with the prior project, but I've copied it again to a new folder so that if you haven't compiled the package introduced in this section yet, you'll still be able to run the sample in the previous section.

What I'd like to do here is show the number of years' experience each of the contacts in this app has. Since the Hire Date field is a date and the date type is a double, all I will need is a way to get the current date; then, I can subtract the two and divide it by 365 to get the number of years difference. Surprisingly, there doesn't seem to be a way to do that. However, with a little knowledge of how these methods are created, it's not too difficult to create one ourselves.

LiveBindings methods are Delphi packages that are installed on the IDE to give us various design-time functionality and syntax checking functionalities; the units also need...