[These are notes from 4D Summit 2008]

Olivier Deschanels & Thibaud Arguillere, 4D SAS

They went over the remote admin capabilities - many things can be done while the server is live, but a few things, like compacting the data file, require the server to be shut down.

When designing using 4D Server/4D Remote you can how compile. Previously you could only check syntax. You can also restart the server to run in compiled/interpreted mode.

The resource fork on Mac is officially deprecated (since Tiger). The v11 solution is to use the resources folder which is replicated from Server to Client. You can also add things on client which are pushed to server and then server pushes to other clients.

Notice that v11.2 now has QUERY SELECTION WITH ARRAY...

They've been adding components to 4DPop... There's an xliff editor, a component to search the 4D online documentation, and an app maker component to aid in editing the xml file that is referenced when building an application, etc.

They emphasized that list boxes that show the current selection are now very fast in client/server mode. You can also have two list boxes showing selections from the same table because you can bind the list box to a named selection... This is really powerful and really makes named selections much more useful.

With popups you can now specify a boolean array that determines whether the row is hidden or not. So, instead of recalculating the contents of the popup you can just set a boolean array as to whether the row should be displayed. This can be significantly faster in client/server mode since you can use arrays residing on the client to compose the boolean array.

You can how have two active windows running in the same process sharing the same set of variables (since v11.1). Do DIALOG ("MyForm";*) this reduces the number of global processes which is important in client/server.

You can how display movies in 4D without any plugins. There is also native support for PDFs. Use web areas - they can display everything your web browser supports - even supports Flash. [That means you can view, but it doesn't the movie or the PDF is a native object in terms of data.] There are automatic actions available for things like back, reload, stop, etc. You can even interact with the web page programmatically using Javascript (provided you know how the page is structured). The system API is WebKit on Mac and IE on Windows.

The commands to work with SVG have been greatly expanded with v11.3 and the SVG component. For example, SVG Find elementID by coordinates (area; mouseX; mouseY). The SVG component comes with it's own documentation available via 4D Pop.

Notice that with pictures you can rescale a picture with TRANSFORM PICTURE without losing data.

[Unfortunately I had to leave for a moment here and I when I got back they were wrapping up. As I came back both Julien Feason and Charlie Vass asked me if I saw the presentation on composite indexes. Apparently composite indexes are absolutely incredible in v11.3. Too bad I missed it.]

Tags: 4D Summit 2008, 4D-v11
Categories: 4D