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

Summary

This chapter focused on desktop applications, taking a slight detour from the main focus of this book, which is building mobile apps. The beauty of FireMonkey is that the same application can run on desktop and mobile platforms, although it takes some extra effort to create a UI that adapts to both. In this chapter, we covered some of the scenarios, but there is more you can explore. We also touched on specific elements of desktop apps and built a macOS and Linux app.

We also focused on app tethering, which is a very powerful set of components to connect desktop applications with mobile companion apps. The app tethering framework allows two arbitrary Delphi apps to exchange data over Bluetooth or TCP/IP, with almost no coding required.

The ability to create desktop applications can certainly come handy for you in many cases, as the power of Delphi is in its ability to target both desktop and mobile apps, and by learning to use FireMonkey, you’ll be able to create...