Borland® Delphi™ 6 Developer's Guide

Chapter 10. Component Architecture: VCL and CLX

IN THIS CHAPTER

• More on the New CLX

• What Is a Component?

• Component Hierarchy

• The Component Structure

• The Visual Component Hierarchy

• Runtime Type Information

Few will recall Borland's first Object Windows Library (OWL), which was introduced with Turbo Pascal for Windows. OWL ushered in a drastic simplification over traditional Windows programming. OWL objects automated and streamlined many tedious tasks you otherwise were required to code yourself. No longer did you have to write huge case statements to capture messages or big chunks of code to manage Windows classes; OWL did this for you. On the other hand, you had to learn a new programming methodology—object-oriented programming.

Then, with Delphi ...