FileMaker gets a lot of attention in our blog, but we are doing ongoing development and support on 4th Dimension applications for about 10 clients currently, keeping at least one of us at Portage Bay busy doing 4D development at any given time.

4D recently visited Seattle as a part of their World Tour 2019, where they are visiting 44 cities around the world with a presentation on new 4D capabilities and advanced training for 4D developers and partners.

I spent two days at the Maxwell Hotel in Seattle learning about new things in the latest versions of 4D and about the latest development techniques from the top trainers and developers at 4D.

One of the more interesting sections was hearing a little about a 4D app in production use that has up to 800 concurrent users! That’s a pretty impressive number.

Provided to attendees as part of the 4D World Tour, is a thumb drive full of interesting 4D tools. This year’s thumb drive has a really interesting looking email editor tool that we’ll be able to plug into our client’s databases to easily add simple HTML/Rich Text formatted email editing capability.

The demonstration of the iOS application creation wizard on the first day was eye opening. Though we’ve created quite a few iOS apps for FileMaker with FileMaker Go and the iOS SDK, we have yet to do a project utilizing 4D for iOS. It was quite interesting to see the wizard generate an iOS app in real time.

From the standpoint of advanced training, one of the major focuses of the training was ORDA, or Object Relational Database Access (ORDA). ORDA adds object oriented programming notation to the 4D programming language and can dramatically expand capabilities and simplify code. We saw multiple examples of a dozen lines of code simplified to two or three. Integrating ORDA into my daily programming habits will be a big goal for me this year, especially as almost all of our clients are on 4D v17 now.

~John Newhoff