VCLs for Delphi for Android

Question

I have seen a project "Delphi for Android" by lenniedevilliers which inspired me very much. I but there is only a few VCLs in that project (tbutton , tEdit and Tlabel). can anyone give me a hint about including menu bar and progress bar for the project

Answer 1

Keep in mind that Delphi for Android (DelphiDroid, for short) uses a "cross-compiler" which reads the DFM file of your VCL form, and converts it to the necessary Java code. As such, extending its understanding of VCL objects (in its current state) requires a rebuild of the cross-compiler itself.

Lennie and I are both exploring two different avenues to make the whole thing more "native", in the sense that you will be able to define custom components for use on the Android platform (possibly even iOS).

Lennie's new approach is to use the PhoneGap framework, whilst my approach (targeting the next release of Delphi) employs the FreePascal compilers and an OpenGL-based GUI platform, enabling full extensibility to develop Android applications using native Pascal code. My solution (if it works properly) would be fully IDE-integrated, so would not require any external tools or command line... you would simply specify that it's an Android application, and a Build instruction would use the appropriate FPC compiler and libraries as you'd want.

All of this is to say that, at present anyway, what you're asking cannot be done (sadly), but rest assured that both Lennie and I are working on it (from two different angles). At least one of those angles will work, hopefully both (to support old and new Delphi versions alike).

Answer 2

The project is open source so your free to go grab the code and contribute. In the other hand you can use Delphi Prism with MonoTouch/MonoDroid or wait for Project Cooper to b release that also fully support Android.

There is no ETA at the moment about the new compiler but it is written in Delphi itself.