How to Use Background Threads to Keep Your User Interface Responsive

RAD Studio is an excellent IDE Software that is ideal for both beginners and professional developers. Thanks to its easy-to-use Form Designer which allows you to simply drag and drop components that you want to add to your app’s user interface. With RAD Studio, you can easily create or build apps with great-looking UIs. However, no matter how well-written your code is, it is still possible for your app to feel sluggish. Sometimes the application or the UI hangs or freezes for significant periods, or it might take forever for the app to process the input.

Be mindful that when an application is launched, the system creates a thread of execution for the application, called the main thread. This thread is very important because it is in charge of dispatching events to the appropriate user interface. That is why the main thread is also sometimes called the UI thread. 

Take note that the system does not create a separate thread for each instance of a component. All components that run in the same process are instantiated in the UI thread, and system calls to each component are dispatched from that thread. This is where the background thread comes into play. 

Making the UI more responsive with a background thread

In this video from the recently concluded Coding Bootcamp 2023, Olaf Monien will walk us through the process of using the background thread to keep your UI thread responsive. Generally, as the term suggests, a background thread is a thread that runs behind the scenes, while the foreground thread continues to run. 

For this video, Olaf will demonstrate how background thread works through a simple Recipe search application. To learn more on how to effectively and efficiently design this application using the RAD Studio, Spoonacular API, and many other useful components in Delphi, feel free to watch the webinar below.

This also concludes with a short Q&A portion with Olaf Monien and Embarcadero Developer Advocate Ian Barker.