Native app development has substantial benefits over framework-based “one size fits all” comprises whether it’s for native windows development or mobile devices. It is simpler, less convoluted and circuitous to create, easier to run, and the user interface is typically smoother with noticeable responsiveness. Often, developers feel there is a barrier holding them back from embracing native development. They believe that they need to have multiple versions in different programming languages so they can develop applications for differing operating system targets. But there is a solution for that!
Table of Contents
Why do I need native app development?
Here is why you need to be developing native apps:
- User experience – from smooth scrolling to device-specific features. With Native development tools, it’s easy to get these qualities.
- Native Apps are more secure – Building a native application is a great way to guarantee your users reliable data protection.
- Performance – With native applications, you can get higher performance.
- Easy access to all features of the device – Native applications have direct access to hardware, for instance, GPS, camera, microphone, and way faster in execution.
Be sure to continue reading to learn about how to develop cross-platform native applications!
In this article, I will show you why you need to consider Delphi to build your next products
Why should I use Delphi to produce my apps?
In short, with Delphi you can:
- Have confident long-term plans
- Create the most secure application
- Have fast time to market
- Have visual creation through powerful WYSIWYG
- Have 5x Faster Productivity
- Have Flexibility and Functionality
- Build an app for 5 different operating system with only one codebase
How can I benchmark help me make a good choice of programming language?
There are an overwhelming number of different benchmarks which attempt to provide an objective (and sometimes skewed) comparison of programming languages. Those white papers mostly compare and analyze energy efficiency and memory efficiency. But the real measure of the language is the productivity, engineering time, and efficacy of effort for developing a real-world application with any given programming language?
Embarcadero Technologies produced a benchmark which fairly measured between 3 different software development tools to create a calculator application using these technologies:
- Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) – with .NET framework
- Electron
- Delphi – Embarcadero Technologies RAD Studio
If you go over and download the whitepaper yourself, you can learn more about every analysis with each detail.
What were the key measures and findings of the whitepaper about developer productivity?
Here you can find, conclusions of
- Productivity – is the measure of effort and code required for developers to complete typical development tasks. Productivity can be realized in 2 distinct ways – reduced coding requirements due to native libraries and IDE tools like code-completion and visual design
- Business functionality – refers to a framework’s business suitability and impact on long-term plans. Excellent functionality allows companies to easily build custom tools or extensions, develop on a platform of their choosing, protect their source code from exploitation, and have confident that their applications will be maintainable for decades.
- Functionality – long-term feasibility like does the framework have a history of stability and backward compatibility. Testing support, accessibility, and intellectual property security by securing project source code.
- Flexibility – flexible frameworks allow businesses to target a broad audience, build software for any field and access all the hardware and operating system functionality without problems.
- Performance of the development frameworks
Moreover, these categories are also divided into several sub-categories to emphasize and reveal the real benchmarks of the engineering bits. For instance, in the flexibility category, you can learn about scalability, database access, access to device-specific features, and target platforms. Or in the performance category, you can explore what is the startup time (which is calculated by doing over 100 executions), standing memory usage, and peak memory usage.
Why would I use RAD Studio Delphi to develop my apps?
- Rapid Application Development
- With hundreds of components and powerful visual designing form you can prototype and build GUI applications in seconds. Moreover, the editor allows you to alter the UI elements with code if you need.
- Complete Support for Windows API
- Delphi VCL (Visual Component Library) is one of the best and very reliable libraries for building Windows Native application with full Windows API support in the market. Visual Component Library built under Win32 API, and this means your app runs under any version of Windows OS without a problem.
- Native and Secure App Development with Delphi
- Delphi builds native applications so that some of security problems are already fixed for you. For instance, Electron and WPF applications are easy to disassemble. From UI elements to the core business logic of the product while apps built with Delphi are hard to reverse engineer except the UI.
- Super easy to learn and utilize
- When you write code in Delphi programming language, it is like writing a poem in English. Furthermore, all the commands and keywords are intuitive. Be sure to watch this video and you will enjoy by seeing how fun it is writing code in Delphi.
- One Codebase for Windows, Android, iOS, macOS, and Linux
- We are not just talking native applications for this operating system; I’m also talking about the power of Delphi with Linux that you can deploy your apps to the Web! Yes, that is right! With the introduction of Linux support on Delphi FireMonkey. Learn how to deploy Delphi FMX as HTML5 via WSL2 and FMXLinux now!
- Rich Database Access
- With FireDAC (Data Access Components) you can connect more than 20 databases with just several clicks. Furthermore, FireDAC supports cross platform and can be used in your Android, iOS, macOS builds of your product.
- High productivity on engineering hours
- If you explore the analysis, you can see how you can create application with much better productivity because of the built-in components and form designer where you can prototype and build apps 5x faster compared to any other software development tool in the market.
- Connect UI Elements to Data Sources without coding using LiveBindings Designer
- You can create business applications with data sources without writing any code. You just need to connect UI controls to the data sources using the LiveBindings Designer. Watch this brief tutorial to learn about the LiveBindings Designer.
- Build and expand with Delphi RTL (Run-Time Library)
- If you master RTL in Delphi, you get a superpower to create anything you want. RTL is composed of several base units that provide the underlying support for most of the VCL and FireMonkey component libraries. The RTL includes global routines, utility classes such as those that represent streams and lists, and classes such as TObject, TPersistent, and TComponent.
- Build Most Memory and Energy Efficient Applications with Delphi/Object Pascal
- There is an analysis where you can see, the time, energy, and memory efficiencies of various most known programming languages. As you can see, Pascal is listed as one of the best time, energy, and memory efficient languages along with C and Go programming languages.
How did the whitepaper fairly compare Delphi against other technologies?
The benchmark application is a Windows 10 Calculator clone. It was recreated in each framework by 3 Delphi Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) volunteers, one expert freelance WPF developer, and one expert Electron freelance developer.
Here are some overviews of the analysis
Did Delphi really win in a fair test against other technologies?
In a word: yes. As you can see, there are lots of advantages to using the Delphi programming language and its frameworks. Be sure to check out the latest version of Delphi 11 Alexandria.
