"My top 5 favorite new features in 4D 2004:
- Tony Ringsmuth
Business Brothers
Deliver Applications That Minimize Your Support TimeA developer’s job doesn’t stop with creating powerful applications. As all developers know, more time is spent on supporting the installation and ongoing support than on development. 4D 2004 was designed to reduce post-development work so that developers can focus on implementing what is more rewarding to both them and the end user—new business functionality!
The performance of 4D 2004 is radically improved to ensure applications run at the highest performance. We focused on improving performance for real-world usage and not just simple benchmarks. Updating applications, formerly a chore, is now as simple as dropping the changes on the server, whether the changes are in your own application or the underlying 4D software. We’ve made it easy for developers to allow end users to modify their own interface, even in compiled apps (of course, all controlled by the developer). So no more calls when an end user wants a button moved from one side of the screen to the other!
Finally, we’ve taken the monotony out of compiling and building applications for the various platforms and configurations you support. 4D 2004 enables the scripted building of applications, allowing the same configurations to be built automatically over and over again.
Performance | All New Backup and Automatic Recovery
Auto Client Distribution | 4D Client Engine | User Modified Forms
The performance of 4D 2004 has been improved dramatically for real-world situations. We’ve made dramatic improvements throughout the product line, including improved cache management (See results below), enhanced memory management (Windows), G5 optimizations for Macintosh OS X, Adaptive Cache management, which allows the system to choose the optimum cache level, and major OS X networking improvements, which were made by upgrading to use native BSD networking rather than the older Open Transport networking.
Your data is critical. 4D 2004's new backup system automatically protects you from any problems your system may encounter. If your system crashes for any reason, the new backup system will automatically restore all your data to a consistent and correct state. And your users will probably not even know the system crashed! Even if the system failure causes catastrophic failure to your data file, the 4D backup system has the built-in intelligence to bring the data back to its correct state. Because code can be triggered before a backup starts and after it ends, you can even send a notification (example: email, IM, SMS, etc.) as to whether your backup completed normally or not, so you have the insurance of knowing that your data is always protected. Backup options can be simply set by pointing and clicking or set automatically within your application.
Most people put off upgrading their applications because of the time and effort it takes. Valuable business functionality is therefore held back from users, costing companies millions of dollars in lost productivity and lost opportunities. 4D Server 2004 makes distributing new versions a breeze. Distributing an application is as simple as dropping the new version of the application on the server. 4D Server 2004 not only distributes the new version of the application, but also any needed updates in the 4D Client Software.
4D 2004 dramatically reduces support for 4D Client users because you can now merge your application with 4D Client to create a double-clickable executable. Double-clicking on this executable starts the client application and automatically connects with the correct 4D Server, even if the server changes IP address. The "Server Following" feature ensures that you have flexibility on your server room configuration without having to re-instruct your users each time you change the server IP address. In addition, users will no longer face confusion over what they’re running as the merged client uses the name and icon you choose.
Whether you're a vertical market or in-house developer, there are always the user requests to make slight changes in their interface to suit their particular requirements. In other environments, this means going back into the development environment, making the modification, and recompiling and redistributing the application. Not so with 4D 2004!! 4D 2004 introduces a revolutionary new feature that allows users access to a "Safe" Form editor to change their forms even in a compiled application. Of course, the developer has total control over what can be changed and who can change it. So, for example, instead of wasting a day on a simple request like changing an address from one side of an invoice to another, a developer can have the application administrator make the changes on the fly. No coding changes, no recompilation, no reinstalling!! Just another way that 4D 2004 makes delivering applications simpler than ever.
Integrated spell checking is a great end-user feature in 4D 2004. Of Course, spell checking is completely under the developer's control. Unlike other environments where spell checking is a client-by-client affair, 4D's spell checking is based on a server level. As new words are added to the dictionaries, everyone using the server can take advantage of the new words. This is a major feature for developers building applications for industries such as healthcare, where industry specific terminology is used.
As developers know, a major step in developing applications that last is the separation of presentation from data. XSLT enables the same XML data to be transformed from one "presentation" to another. 4D 2004 supports XSLT, allowing any developer to transform data from one format to another. So, for example, if your customer wants a report output to Excel today, and later asks to change the output to Word, you can simply change the Stylesheet your application is calling and transform the data without any change in your compiled application.
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