[These are notes from 4D Summit 2008. Pictures will come later...]

Presentation by 4D Inc. Web 2.0 Team

Web 2.0 is all about rich user interfaces, another factor is the ability to constantly roll out new enhancements. One of the other factors is the fact that end users are driving the features by saying "I saw that on {insert site here}"... However, big corporations are just starting to get into it. Improving customer experience is the number one reason for doing it.

One of the problems is that it's hard for companies to find developers with RIA experience.

There are three ways of doing RIAs:

• Browser - AJAX
• Player - Flex and to a smaller extent Silverlight
• Desktop - Adobe AIR (for lightweight stuff) and Java FX

Ajax doesn't really exist per se - it's a set of technologies.

One good thing is that there is now (finally) innovation in web browsers and the Javascript in the browser is getting better and better. That is absolutely vital to AJAX solutions working well and working reliably.

Flex gives you a richer interface and a more consistent experience than AJAX. Flex apps run in the Flash player.

HTML 5 is the biggest leap forward in web standards in almost a decade. One of the big things is that it offers offline storage. Google Gears also has offline storage (it's the offline storage solution in Chrome). The idea is that when you're offline you can access the data you have locally, plus add new data which gets synced with the server when you go online.

Adobe AIR is great for lightweight apps written in AJAX or Flex. It lets you run web apps on the desktop without a browser.

Mobile technology is the next new big thing - just getting out of it's infancy.

Last year they showed read-only iPhone interfaces. In the past year they've rolled out a web client for iPhone with the ability to write back to your database including offline data entry.

There's also a web client for web browsers that Julien showed which has gotten more advanced in the past year. There's even a GUI for the development process. That has gotten more sophisticated in the past year as well.

They've built 4D Ajax for Dreamweaver which simplifies the process for working with 4D AJAX using Dreamweaver. It gives you dialogs to help you configure the 4D AJAX areas and integrates nicely with your corporate stylesheets, etc.

With 4D Ajax Framework v11 release 3 they're moving toward a more MVC (model view controller) centered approach where data is separated from design. The demo was called "Green Tea". Their goal is to create more of a 4GL approach to RIA development. Green Tea was actually really cool. It's very slick and can generate AJAX apps for the web, Adobe AIR, Google widgets, or dashboard widgets... Very slick. There's a lot of what you expect in a tool like 4D, only it's building RIAs - property lists, live previews with real data, etc. One other cool thing is that Green Tea is a 4D Ajax Framework application (that builds 4D Ajax Framework apps). It's easy to apply custom CSS to the areas as well.

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