Book Image

Expert Delphi - Second Edition

By : Marco Cantù, Paweł Głowacki
Book Image

Expert Delphi - Second Edition

By: Marco Cantù, Paweł Głowacki

Overview of this book

Master Delphi, the most powerful Object Pascal IDE and versatile component library for cross-platform native app development, by harnessing its capabilities for building natively compiled, blazingly fast apps for all major platforms, including Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, and Linux. Expert Delphi begins with a quick overview of Delphi, helping you get acquainted with the IDE and the Object Pascal language. The book then quickly progresses to more advanced concepts, followed by the architecture of applications and the FireMonkey library, guiding you through building server-side services, parallel programming, and database access. Toward the end, you’ll learn how to integrate your app with various web services and deploy them effectively. By the end of this book, you’ll be adept at building powerful, cross-platform, native apps for iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS—all from a single code base.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Part 1: Building Blocks
6
Part 2: Going Mobile
12
Part 3: From Data to Services
19
Index

Single source for mobile and desktop

The beauty of building applications using FireMonkey is that you can compile them for each of the supported platforms and they just work, adapting automatically to the platform controls’ style and look and feel. Additionally, as we have seen, you can adapt the UI to each of the platforms you want to target, by creating specific views in the FireMonkey form designer in the Delphi IDE.

Therefore, it is possible to build a single app for multiple platforms. We have focused on building native apps for Android and iOS, seamlessly. However, within the desktop world, there are additional considerations to take into account. One of them is the fact that screens tend to be wide, and applications tend to stretch horizontally, unlike in the mobile world. Also, most visual interaction is through the mouse rather than through the touch of a finger. This affects the entire UI design.

There are many other differences for desktop applications, and...