Preface

The world of mobile app development is becoming more and more complex. Technology is continuously evolving. Every day, new versions of mobile operating systems are released in the market. Mobile devices are getting new capabilities. User expectations are constantly growing, and it is harder and harder to meet them.

The only way to meet and exceed all challenges in the contemporary world of mobile development is to become a developer superhero. Superheroes have super tools. In this book, we are going to embark on the journey of mastering Delphi development to build mobile apps. We will learn how to develop amazing productivity powers and rapidly build stunning cross-platform mobile apps from one codebase.

We will start by getting comfortable in using Delphi’s Integrated Development Environment. Next, we will review the key constructs in the Object Pascal language and everyday programmer tasks so you can easily understand and write solid and maintainable source code. Over the course of this book, the fun levels will only increase. We will start our adventure with mobile development with Delphi by building small projects that will make you feel like a real Delphi developer. Having mastered simple things, we will be ready to do more serious stuff. We will go deep into understanding the concept of FireMonkey styles, which is the cornerstone of building stunning cross-platform user interfaces that will make a difference in the end-user experience of your apps. The rest of the journey is all about gaining practical knowledge of using more complex Delphi frameworks. We will get down to the metal and harness the full power of mobile hardware and operating systems. We will be working with sensors, building data-driven user interfaces, embedding mobile databases, integrating with REST web services and the Cloud, and defining scalable, multiuser backends.

But why Delphi? There are two main platforms for mobile apps that are dominating the mobile market: Android and iOS. It is a common requirement to develop an app for both platforms. This typically means using different tools, frameworks, and programming languages. If you want to build a mobile app for iOS, you would typically use the Xcode development environment from Apple and use Swift as the programming language. Android development requires different tools. For Android, you would typically use a tool like Android Studio from Google and the Java programming language. These are two different worlds that speak different languages. If you want to build your app for both, this typically means having two different sets of skills and in practice two different teams of developers. Mobile app development gets more and more fragmented. One can be an iOS developer, and somebody can specialize in Android.

This is where the advantage of a tool like Delphi becomes significant: You can write a single application, and the same source code written with a single programming language and using a single set of user interface controls will work on both iOS and Android. Not only does it work but it also works great, leveraging the platform features and adapting to the different UI requirements.

Not only that, Delphi also offers you the ability to build the backend for your mobile apps, offering REST-based access to your own services from your mobile app.

With Delphi, you can become a mobile developer superhero and develop unmatched productivity powers to build complete mobile apps using just one tool, one framework, and one programming language to create mobile apps for both iOS and Android and desktop applications for Mac and Windows. At the same time, you can also build scalable REST API backends that will power your mobile apps on all platforms.