[These are notes from 4D Summit 2008]

Luc Hollande, CEO 4D SAS

About 25% of this year's attendees are from abroad - from 18 countries.

Revenue is up, profit is strong, and cash in the bank is up considerably. Was not achieved by cutting R&D. 25% of revenue is put into R&D.

Open standards and speed to market are their emphasis with the side benefit is the ability to bring in programmers with more mainstream skillsets.

Another emphasis is calability, including over WANs.

They're also getting serious about lifecycle management - documentation, version control, etc.

And of course Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are a focus as well.

Brendan Coveney, CEO 4D, Inc.

Licensing is migrating an annual maintenance model rather than pay-once... Joe Batts came up and spoke about how it works in real-life. You get the standard partner discounts. No sticker shock for new versions means less resistance to upgrades.

SVG is incredibly powerful - xml-based graphics (not raster images).

Jody Bevan of Jonoke Software came up and spoke about scalability. Has some HUGE users - 30+ segments of data, hundreds of users per server. He's seeing some big speed improvements between 11.2 and 11.3. Without any code changes v11 was 900-1350% faster than v2004 on real customer data. In another application they saw 360-1450% increases in speeds. In both cases the tasks were very intensive and no additional indexes were added. When testing WAN performance, an uncompiled v11 app run over the WAN was faster than a compiled 2004 app running on the local network.

Web services have been improved with keep-alive connections and server-to-server SQL is improved with data compression.

Using another 4D database (on 4D Server) is really really simple - just change one parameter and use SQL. 4D Open isn't needed - it's much simpler this way - just about as easy as using local data. Don't even need to install anything like ODBC drivers.

A tech note is coming that explains how to compare version histories on methods - highlighting changes. Very cool.

Knowledgebase is being redone and will be available in a few weeks. What they showed us is AJAX based interface that uses text keyword indexing. They've also reduced the amount of time to get new articles up on the web. From 8-10 hours to immediate - engineers can get things up right away without having to go through other people to do styling, etc.

4D Store is being rewritten with 4D Flex and it will be an international solution, not just US.

Steve Orth of the Aquila Group talked about his experience with RIAs. The application was for Eaton Electrical and they won the contract a few years ago where they beat out IBM for the contract (so great things are expected). They are a large electrical equipment manufacturer. Two other clients wanted a web client as well. One of the advantages they found was that because the client interface is in accepted standards (like AJAX) there was zero resistance. They went from zero at last year's summit to a full-fledged web app very quickly.

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