Book Image

Mastering Delphi Programming: A Complete Reference Guide

By : Primož Gabrijelčič
Book Image

Mastering Delphi Programming: A Complete Reference Guide

By: Primož Gabrijelčič

Overview of this book

Delphi is a cross-platform Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that supports rapid application development for most operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, iOS, and now Linux with RAD Studio 10.2. If you know how to use the features of Delphi, you can easily create scalable applications in no time. This Learning Path begins by explaining how to find performance bottlenecks and apply the correct algorithm to fix them. You'll brush up on tricks, techniques, and best practices to solve common design and architectural challenges. Then, you'll see how to leverage external libraries to write better-performing programs. You'll also learn about the eight most important patterns that'll enable you to develop and improve the interface between items and harmonize shared memories within threads. As you progress, you'll also delve into improving the performance of your code and mastering cross-platform RTL improvements. By the end of this Learning Path, you'll be able to address common design problems and feel confident while building scalable projects. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: Delphi High Performance by Primož Gabrijel?i? Hands-On Design Patterns with Delphi by Primož Gabrijel?i?
Table of Contents (19 chapters)

Setting up a communication channel

The biggest problem of TThread is that it only allows communication to flow from the background thread to the owner.  As you've seen in the previous chapter, we can use different mechanisms for that—Windows messages, Synchronize, Queue, and polling. There is, however, no built-in way to send messages in a different direction, so you have to build such a mechanism yourself. This is not entirely trivial.

Another problem with built-in mechanisms is that they make for unreadable code. Synchronize and Queue are both inherently messy because they wrap a code that executes in one thread inside a code executing in a different thread. Messages and polling have a different problem. They decouple code through many different methods, which sometimes makes it hard to understand the system.

To fix all these problems (and undoubtedly introduce...