Fasten Your Seat Belts

The key benefit of Delphi in mobile development is that you can design your app once and you can natively compile it for both Android and iOS from the same source code. This chapter is exactly about this capability. We are going to install Delphi, create a simple one-button “Hello World” app, and then run the same app on an Android phone and an iOS device.

The integrated development environment (IDE) is where the programmer spends most of their time. Learning best practices of using the IDE will pay off in the future and will increase your developer productivity. Before building apps, you need to feel comfortable working in the Delphi IDE.

The objective of this chapter is to help you install the Delphi IDE, learn basic IDE functionality, and prepare it for mobile development.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Delphi installation
• Riding the IDE
• Deploying to mobile devices

Delphi installation

Delphi is a Windows program, so you need to have a computer with a proper version of Windows installed and enough free space on your hard drive. You may want to install Delphi on a physical computer or a Windows virtual machine image using one of the available virtualization solutions, such as VMWare. In this case, you can also use a Mac computer with a Windows virtual machine. Installing it on a virtual machine has some advantages in cross-platform development. To create iOS apps, you will need to have access to a Mac computer anyway. This could be another computer available on the local network or the same physical machine configured with a virtual machine to run the IDE. Whether you choose to install Delphi on a physical or virtual Windows machine, the installation process is the same.

Delphi is implemented as a native Windows 32-bit executable, but it is recommended to install it on 64-bit versions of Windows 11, or a recent 64-bit version of Windows 10.

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Riding the IDE

In a nutshell, Delphi is a program for making other programs. The program responsible for generating executable files from the source code is a compiler. It is typically implemented as a command-line application, but it can also be invoked directly from the IDE. When executing the compiler as a command-line application, you can pass to it command-line parameters. As depicted in Figure 1.6, compilers take different command-line parameters, including the location of source code files necessary to generate the resulting binary file:

Figure 1.6: A simplified compiler architecture

It is possible to write your programs using a text editor such as Notepad and then execute the compiler from the command line, but it is not the most efficient way of creating applications. Most programmers use IDEs to work on apps. The idea of an IDE originates from Delphi’s ancestor – Borland Turbo Pascal, in the 1980s – and it comes from the...

Deploying to mobile devices

Our DelphiHelloWorld project is now ready for deployment to mobile devices. We have already built and run it on Windows. Now, we are going to deploy it to an Android device, and then to iOS.

There is a one-time preparation phase for mobile development that you need to go through after Delphi is installed. We want to get to the point in which you can see your devices as targets inside the Project Manager area.

For Android, all the steps to configure your system to detect your device are described at https://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/en/Configuring_Your_System_to_Detect_Your_Android_Device.

Deploying to Android

Deploying apps from Delphi to Android devices is simpler than deploying to iOS. You only need to have an Android device and a USB cable to connect your device to a Windows machine where you have Delphi installed.

The first step is to enable USB debugging on the device. This option can be set in Developer options on your device...

Summary

In this chapter, we installed Delphi and configured it for mobile development, configuring the SDKs for Android and iOS. We also learned about some of the basic functionalities of the IDE.

Now, we are going to change gears and focus on the Object Pascal programming language. This is the programming that’s used by Delphi – the language itself is also known as the Delphi programming language.