Foreword

I have known and worked with Paweł Głowacki for more than 16 years. Paweł is one of the world-wide Delphi community leading experts. In this book, Expert Delphi, Paweł takes you on a learning journey that started in the early 1980s with Compas Pascal, Poly Pascal, and Turbo Pascal. For more than 20 years, Delphi has continued to evolve to meet the needs of developers around the world. During most of this time, Paweł has been a key team member and advocate for the continuous innovation of the compilers, frameworks, runtime library, integrated development environment, and tool chain, allowing developers to easily build applications across desktop, server, mobile, internet, and cloud platforms.

With FireMonkey (FMX), developers can build on top of a modern multiplatform framework based on a rich history of objects, components, and libraries and that has included Turbo Vision, Object Windows, and the VCL. Leveraging these frameworks, libraries, and tools allows developers to create applications for a wide range of architectures, databases, and distributed computing environments.

In his presentations and examples, Paweł shows you how easy it is to create a wide range of applications using SQL/NoSQL databases, XML, and JSON. Paweł also helps developers create multitier applications using the latest technologies, including REST.

As a member of and a leading advocate for the large, global Delphi community and ecosystem, Paweł is uniquely qualified to show you how to become a mobile developer superhero, become a hyper-productive software engineer, and build one source code application that can be compiled to all major mobile platforms and form factors. Paweł also shows you how to build stunning 2D and 3D multidevice graphical user interfaces with the FireMonkey library, providing an outstanding user experience for your application's users.

With Expert Delphi, you'll learn the best practices for writing high-quality, reliable, and maintainable code with Delphi's Object Pascal language and component architecture. After you complete Paweł's book, you'll understand how to take full advantage of mobile operating systems, frameworks, and hardware capabilities, including working with sensors and the Internet of Things.

Beyond developing apps for desktops and smartphones, you'll learn how to quickly and easily integrate with cloud services and data using REST APIs and JSON. You'll also learn how to architect and deploy powerful mobile backend services.

In Expert Delphi, Paweł encapsulates the knowledge gained through years as a world-class Delphi engineer, an entertaining presenter, a community leader, and a passionate advocate. With his words, step-by-step instructions, screenshots, source code snippets, examples, and links to additional sources of information, you will learn how to continuously enhance your skills and apps.

Become a developer superhero and build stunning cross-platform apps with Delphi.

David Intersimone "David I"

Vice President of Developer Communities, Evans Data Corp. and Embarcadero Community MVP.

Santa Cruz, California, USA