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

Do-it-yourself with DataSnap

WebBroker is good for a basic level HTTP server functionality, but the more complex the system you want to build, the more you look into complete Delphi multi-tier frameworks such as DataSnap (covered in this section) or RAD Server (covered in the next chapter). They provide a lot more high-level functionality than you can find in WebBroker. However, notice that the higher-level multi-tier solutions are available only in the Enterprise and Architect versions of Delphi, not in the Professional and Community Editions.

The DataSnap framework has been part of Delphi since its early days and has evolved over that time. Delphi 3 introduced the MIDAS technology to make it easy to build client/server database applications. In Delphi 6, this technology has been renamed to DataSnap, and in Delphi 2009, it has been completely rewritten. In this new architecture, remote methods published by a DataSnap server looked like database-stored procedures that a typical...