[Notes from 4D Summit 2008.]

Christophe Keromen, Senior Product Manager, 4D SAS

To meet changing demands 4D will be focusing more on RIAs.

They'll also focus on collaborative development.

The infrastructure is changing as well... Wi-Fi, mobile computing, etc... The Ajax framework is important there as well.

4D will target 64-bit

Require fewer resources, and focus on mobile friendly technologies

They understand the need to soften the learning curve for current developers. Green Tea is a good example.

Revision and maintenance is the bulk of the apps lifecycle. As a result they can bring down the cost of ownership by focusing on lifecycle management.

They're coming out with a "Solution Manager" that will be a replacement for v11 Explorer. This comes from the fact that you can have apps with no data. The beginning of project management.

Version control is coming! Items will be externalized out of the 4DB file. Methods will be text files on disk. Forms will be external binary files. Other items will be externalized as well. The goal being to externalize everything.

There will be the concept of projects which will be much broader than the concept now. A solution will be one or more projects.

There will be support for multiple languages in 4D. Just as you can switch to SQL now, there will be support for even more languages.

Components can be edited while running the host database.

There will be aliases in groups, meaning an object can be a member of multiple groups.

There will be a filterable list of objects. The filtering will be pretty advanced.

You'll be able to edit a method in the preview.

More than than 91% of developers use source control - it's expected these days.

Version control will include Checkout, Update/Sync, and Checkin/Commit.

Since 4D is committed to open standards, version control for 4D will use industry standards. 4D's solution will be compatible with MSCCI (Microsoft's solution).  This means compatibility with commercial solutions and open source solutions (on Windows).

For OS X (and Windows) there will be 4D Server integrated version control. It's automatic with no configuration needed. It will require 4D Server. It will include a local repository so changes can be committed after they've been tested so other developers aren't affected by new bugs.

A new code editor is coming as well... Bigger font, smaller font... Folding has been improved. Find functionality is improved - highlights everything matching the text you enter, or just full words, etc. There's a bookmarking feature that then lets you navigate through the items that are found. When you have compiler errors there will be a special bullet in the sidebar that when you hover over it will tell you the error. Further, bullets will move when you add/remove lines above the bullet.

You can also use the code editor to edit Javascript, XML, HTML, PHP and CSS. A huge improvement is the ability to edit 4D web templates - so an XML file with the 4D web tags in them, etc. You'll have colored syntax, auto completion and folding at a minimum for each.

The next version will have SQL Views - basically virtual tables.

SQL server will continue to get better with each incremental release.

JSON (Javascript Object Notation is a way of describing data) will be supported in the next version. People who use it talk about AJAJ rather than AJAX... It's an easier way of dealing with data with Javascript.

They're going to implement a way Object Relational Mapping (ORM) so you can define a concept (an "entity model") from a business logic point of view so users don't have to be aware of how the data are stored relationally.  For example: Employee.Department.Name or Employee. Emp_MeetingList[1].Meeting.When Employee.EmployeeDetails.birthdate - much simpler way of thinking of data relationships.

4D will be able to generate a SQL view from an entity model and vice versa.

Everywhere you can use a table you can use an entity model instead.

Their RIA Server will support all the basics - HTML, Javascript, CSS, SWF (for Flex) but can serve data via XML or JSON.

The HTTP Server will have session management, DAF integration, PHP code execution. The HTTP server will be rewritten and based on Apache (but he didn't say that ).

They will improve existing method-oriented services as they did v11.2 and v11.3 with keep-alive and http compression. However, they're bring out new data-oriented services (XML, JSON, RSS) and based on Entity models. It will be based on the REST architecture. So the format will be specified in the URL (something like &format=rss or &format=json or &format=xml).

Not everything can be done in a browser, so they'll continue to innovate with client/server and standalone apps.

"Don't ask when"... 

Tags: 4D Summit 2008
Categories: 4D, Web 2.0, Web Application Development