Delphi Component Design

When I saw this book for the first time, I've got my first chock: I was used to books with more than 1000 pages and this one had few more than 300. Browsing it, I've had my second chock: comparing to other Delphi books, there was almost no Delphi code in it.

I was intrigued: but isn't this a book that teaches how to build components? it should come full of code, new components. Then I understood its title: Delphi Component Design. This isn't a book that teaches how to build components, it teaches how to design components.

It goes a step beyond the technical creation of components, teaching how to build a well designed component.

Danny Thorpe is a Delphi Developer Team member, and technical revisor of many books. He shows some technical details that allow not only build better components, but also better programs.

The book is divided in three parts:

• Analysis and Design - Here he shows something about Delphi history, and why some solutions were implemented. Then he talks about the two types of component users: the application creator (component user) and component creator. With this, he gives an idea of who will be using components and how it should be designed. Then, he shows how to begin designing components: identify what it should do and how it will be extended.
• Implementation Details - In this part are shown details that help the component creation. The first chapter in this part shows how to use polymorphism and technical details about Dynamic Method Tables (DMT) and Virtual Method Tables (VMT). The next chapter shows how to use exceptions. Following this, he talks about Runtime Type Information (RTTI), that allows seeing component information at runtime, property reading and writing (streaming), using Windows messages, COM and OLE, finishing this part with a chapter about optimizing code.
• Design time support tools - This last part shows how to extend Delphi IDE, to ease component creation and editing: property editors, component editors and add-ins.

This book doesn't show how to build components. A better one to this task would be Ray Konopka's book Developing Custom Delphi Components, but it gives tips to do a better component design, to make it better, faster and more efficient, integrating to Delphi IDE.

Danny Thorpe shows some information hard to find, like DMT and VMT structures, showing clearly the difference between dynamic and virtual methods, he talks about abstract interfaces and shows how to put property reading and writing to help you.

Summing this up, this is a book that contains more information than examples and is highly recommended to everyone who built some components and wants to make them better.

The book comes with a CD Rom with all the source code in the book (a total of 1Mb) and a Fractal Image File (FIF) Viewer.

Author: Danny Thorpe

Editor: Addison-Wesley

339 pages

Level: Intermediate+ to Advanced

ISBN: 0-201-46136-6

Price: 36.95

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