[DUG] XE7 and Android Development

[David Brennan]

We created an Android app in XE6 using a moderate amount of code from one of
our big Delphi projects. It went OK and we successfully demonstrated the app
on phones at a trade show recently, people liked the app. During development
we had a few annoyances with how Firemonkey behaved but in general it wasn't
too bad.

 

However getting our existing code (even units with no forms/frames) to work
was a bigger issue than expected. We did it in a development branch were we
hacked things a moderate amount to get uses clauses and everything to
compile with ifdefs, commenting stuff out, etc. A surprising amount of basic
classes such as TPoint, TRect, etc (I think if I am remembering correctly)
are not available in Firemonkey so we had to do quite a bit of hacking. As a
result the 'hacked' development branch can't be used to compile VCL apps and
will be thrown out (effectively it was a prototype). The next step is for us
to refactor our code properly to allow us to cross compile between VCL and
Firemonkey with a minimum of ifdefs. This will be a reasonable sized project
so it is waiting while other more valuable projects are being worked on.

 

Based on that fairly limited experience we believe Firemonkey to be viable
for serious apps and we think it makes good sense if you have an existing
code base which you want to cross compile between Windows and Android/iOS.
Whether Firemonkey is the best choice for someone who doesn't need to cross
compile is a different matter, you get some benefits from prior Delphi
experience but the controls, designer and some RTL portions are different so
you still have a bit of a learning curve.

 

Cheers,

David.

 

 

From: delphi-bounces at listserver.123.net.nz
[mailto:delphi-bounces at listserver.123.net.nz] On Behalf Of Eric A
Sent: Thursday, 22 January 2015 3:15 p.m.
To: delphi at listserver.123.net.nz
Subject: [DUG] XE7 and Android Development

 

Has anyone in the DUG :

 

a) done serious Android device development using XE?

 

b) installed and used XE7, particularly for Android apps?

 

If not XE, what are people using/recommending as the best development
platform for Android app development? (would be nice if it could be hosted
on Linux, but not essential).

 

Eric

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