8

I have typical rich gui fat clients and am considering moving to lighter html displaying clients using embedded chrome, but now FireMonkey looks potentialy interesting too.

The 2d/3d transformations are nice, but I'm writing typical bussiness apps, and there are features I'd need in order to consider using FireMonkey.

  1. Does it have grid/list/tree controls, and if so what features does it have (sorting, drop down menus, date edits, etc)
  2. Can it display html ? How about html editing ?
  3. How efficiently does it transfer over Remote Desktop/VNC ?

ps

I'm aware it's still unreleased, but someone might know (if not now, then after release)

  • 3
    It's very hard to imagine that you'll get any definitive replies considering that the NDAs will still be in place. Can't you just wait a couple of weeks and see for yourself? – David Heffernan Aug 06 '11 at 16:57

4 Answers4

4

what I see in FM screenshots and videos is what KsDev was already offering but packaged into Delphi, so I think the features are mostly the same, which is really good indeed

anon
  • 41
  • 1
2

Using TeamViewer works fine, renders accelerated 3D and has the option to disable Aero Glass.

David Berneda
  • 490
  • 5
  • 9
2
  1. It does have a rather basic control set, which doesn't support anything fancy
  2. No, there is currently no support for displaying HTML
  3. Not sure, seen conflicting reports, havent tried myself

So, my conclusion is that FireMonkey is still too raw and risky to use. There is currently no 3rd party support. Best to give it a year or two and see how it works out.

0

Everything will very much depend on remote desktop protocols which you use. For example in case of Win2008+Vista or Win2008R2+Win7 (when Aero can be enabled over RDP) everything should be pretty smooth and efficient. In other cases FM will need some additional tweaks, I think.

Torbins
  • 2,111
  • 14
  • 16
  • I don't necessarily agree with this. Remote solutions will have to transfer raster images surely? – David Heffernan Aug 06 '11 at 16:55
  • RDP intercepts GUI drawing calls and redirects them to the client. Redirecting FillRect(..) with a solid color is much faster than transmitting a huge gray rectangle. But I guess you can even speed this up, too, if your GUI minimizes it's drawing calls / doesn't draw large bitmaps. – magnoz Aug 06 '11 at 23:13
  • David Heffernan: not all. Some of them are smart enough to transfer drawing api calls over network, and execute them on the client. – Torbins Aug 07 '11 at 08:32
  • 1
    @David At least under Windows 7, RDP also transfers all Direct 3D calls through the network, not plain raster pictures (like VNC). So it should be smooth. – Arnaud Bouchez Aug 21 '11 at 17:14