"My top 5 favorite new features in 4D 2004:
- Dave Terry
PDM, Inc.
Develop the Applications Your Users DemandUsers today are tech savvy. They know what they want and they want their applications to deliver. This puts tremendous pressure on developers to build powerful, high-performing applications. 4D 2004 provides developers all the tools they need to satisfy their users’ demanding and ever-increasing requirements.
Furthermore, 4D 2004 enables developers to easily integrate their applications into the user’s application “ecosystem.” Whether the user is running MS Office, or utilizing the various applications that run on OS X, such as iCal or Address Book, 4D 2004 gives developers the tools to build applications that talk to all the other applications people use every day.
Communicating with External Applications | Object Libraries
Web Services | XML | XSLT | ODBC | New Web Commands
Developers are under pressure to deliver better applications quicker and cheaper. One of the best ways to achieve this is to avoid reinventing the wheel. In other words, use existing technologies. 4D 2004 allows 4D developers to take advantage of a myriad of technologies, whether through Web services, XML, etc. Furthermore, 4D can talk to any application through a brand new command in 4D 2004. Now it’s simple to call COM Objects, AppleScript, Perl Scripts and PHP Scripts and get results from these scripts.
Imagine having all your commonly used objects in a library that can simply be dragged and dropped into every application you're working on. Any form object and its code can be added to the Object Library. Object Libraries can be shared or sold to other developers. For development teams, senior developers can simply create all the application core standard objects and share them with junior developers.
Users today want applications that communicate with other applications in their application “ecosystem.” Web services is the glue that allows all standards-based applications to talk together. With Web services, developers can build components based on business functionality rather than objects based on technology. 4D 2004 builds on 4D's already impressive Web services support to enhance DOC Style support, add security features and improve the award-winning Web Services Code Generation wizard.
XML is the data interchange standard. All modern applications use XML as the means of interchanging data. 4D 2003 introduced XML to the 4D world with the addition of DOM Parsing. 4D 2004 enhances its XML support with the addition of SAX Parsing, which is particularly useful when parsing large XML files, as well as support for XPath notation, which eases the finding of data in XML files. Furthermore, 4D 2004 offers new support to allow developers to create XML data files quickly and conveniently.
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.
Connecting with other datasources has never been easier. 4D 2004 offers Export and Import from any ODBC Datasource. For the developer we have made it even easier to connect from your application to other datasources. 4D 2004 includes more than 10 new commands that allow applications to dynamically read and write data from any ODBC Datasource.
4D 2004 hasn't forgotten the Web developer either. As for infrastructure, we've updated the integrated HTTP Server to HTTP 1.1, which delivers major performance enhancements. On OS X we've added security features to allow access to port 80 without the security risk of being logged in as root. Additonally, we've added new features to allow 4D Developers to use and have complete control over the 1000's of open source CGI's built in Perl and PHP.
International | Company | Contact 4D | Site Map | Privacy Policy | © 4D, Inc. 1995-2008 | Change font size: [A] [A] [A] | 
| 4D RSS Feeds
