A year or so ago, a developer lamented to me about the lack of 4D learning opportunities. Over the last few months we have tasked a team led by Chris V and Carin T to develop and manage the roll out of various training sessions. I believe they have made a tremendous start, there is still a long way to go or to paraphrase Churchill, it is not the beginning of the end but rather the end of the beginning. So far they have rolled out seven new online sessions , announced this year’s 4D Summit and today announced a series of seven roadshows across the country. There’s that number seven again, I must check which of them is superstitious

While developing curriculum is one part of their role, their other role is to ensure that 4D is recognized for delivering quality and value for money learning opportunities. Of course we are the 4D vendor but we want to be seen to be delivering the highest quality of trainings whether they be for trainings where there is a lot of competition in the Javascript or Flex areas or topics where being the vendor gives us a credibility lead such as in depth training on the new ‘4D v11 SQL Indexing schemes.

Another challenge is to get the mixture of classroom and online trainings correct. In some cases this is an easy decision as some trainings lend themselves to a short format ideal for web based learning but for other trainings that take eight or so hours it will be interesting to see if 4D developers like the opportunity for learning on the web or prefer traditional classroom formats. So as in most things this will also be a learning opportunity for us on how to deliver training that developers value.

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A few months ago, I tried to speak about simplicity and one of the real challenges of building Web 2.0 Apps is how to simplify your applications .

Rudi showed me Erik Burke’s blog and in particular these images which say it much better than I could ever do.

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Some of our guys had the great luck to be in NY this week for the AjaxWorld Conference . While there they attended the 4D New York User Group. . They gave a demonstration of the new grid features of 4D Ajax Framework v11 Release 1. As usual the great Jay Harper did a wonderful summary of the session. Here is his summary. Thanks as usual Jay for the great reporting! And thanks to Paul, Gary, Jay and Christophe for organizing this.

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Wow, time flies very quickly and the blog hasn’t been updated as Peter pointed out in a very very long time. A few months ago I blogged about a cool new listbox for the web we were working on A Listbox for the Web . No excuse but because of the intensive feedback we received at the summit, from our beta testers and the few kind souls who posted it took us a bit longer than we originally thought. We believe it incorporates everything that was asked for and even more.

Here is a sneak preview of what we will be releasing later this month ListBox Demos

We’d love to hear what you think!

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I am sitting here today, just hours before the launch of 4D v11 SQL, and my mind goes back to the many meetings we had internally about this project. It was a massive undertaking and I’m not too proud to admit that at times, in my weaker moments, doubt may have crept in as to our ability to execute. I am so proud today to say not only we have executed what we originally set out to do, but I feel very strongly that what the engineering team has pulled off is nothing short of an engineering miracle.

There’s an old Silicon Valley saying that the reason God could invent the world in six days was that he had no existing customer base to worry about. Here at 4D, we are famous for providing an easy upgrade path for our existing customers, so the six day option wasn’t available to us. Our engineers had to design a path from the existing database design to a new 21st Century database engine while still maintaining close to 100% compatibility with existing applications and code. It is no wonder that companies like Oracle have shied away from such an engineering effort, preferring to stay away from such a huge challenge and instead to add layer after layer to their existing database engine code, because it’s not even close to being easy to do. And yet, we at 4D have done it.

Today, you, the 4D developer, can look ahead, proud that you are working with the latest database engine technology, running on a clean, all-new 21st Century open SQL platform, designed from the ground up to tackle the challenges that 21st century business face. On top of this, you can also take advantage of your investment in your existing applications and frameworks knowing that the 4D Engineering team have delivered again. So my hat goes off to our team, and I salute their incredible abilities, their dedication, but most of all their constant commitment to an ideal, that 4D always provides a transparent path to the latest technologies!

It was a long wait for 4D v11 SQL, but I think you’ll find it was worth it. Try it out and let me know what you think.

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When we started the Web 2.0 Pack project, one of our goals was to deliver rapid releases that could add more functionality and fix customer issues in a timely fashion. One question that we have debated is how often we should release. Developers want new features but also crave a stable unchanging platform. In short, having too many updates can be as bad as not updating enough.

Our initial release was on February 14th, and we followed that up on May 9th with the 1.1 release. Since then we’ve released a patch for 4D Live Window to fix an issue with “WEB_SetContent”. So right now we are on a 90 day release cycle, but we don’t want to remain in that cycle. Sometimes we will release sooner, and sometimes it will take longer to deliver the quality of release in terms of stability and features.

We’re more interested in getting things right than we are in meeting an arbitrary deadline. For example, another company in our business promised a quarterly release cycle and in a lot of cases their releases have been castigated by their users for being buggy and insufficient quality. Their promise of a release of every 90 days has locked them in to delivering a release even if it isn’t of the quality their users expect and demand. You wouldn’t want that from 4D, and we don’t want to be that company.

Having a rapid release cycle does pose some interesting opportunities for our development team. It necessitates very strong product planning so that we can add features in an incremental fashion, adding value with every release. Each feature gets built in steps and each step is validated and road tested before the next layer of functionality is added. This leads to a much higher quality of release than a “big bang” feature development approach.

Luckily, 4D Web 2.0 Pack is an ideal product for the rapid release model as so many new technologies are getting announced in this area of technology. For example, we are all very excited about the opportunities that the recent “Google Gears” announcement will offer Ajax applications. Our rapid release model ensures that we can look at these advancements in technologies and adopt those which will provide immediate benefit to you, the developer. This of course, ensures that our team needs to always be up to date and always on their toes.

It is exciting to be involved in a technology that is delivering on its promises so fast!

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Well, the secret is out of the bag. Steve Jobs, today, announced the way to develop third party apps on the iPhone will be through Web 2.0 applications. In addition, primarily, we would guess, to facilitate the testing of such applications on windows, Apple also announced the release of Safari 3 on Windows. This is very clever of Apple because all browsers are not equal and we can tell you that a lot of our development and testing goes into ensuring browser compatibility, having Safari 3 available on Windows will allow windows developers to test compatibility with Safari before deploying to the iPhone.

Of course, 4D developers are now in a great position to be the leaders in getting their applications onto the iPhone. 4D Web 2.0 Pack, today, offers all of the tools to get your data onto the iPhone. We have already scheduled a session at the summit on iPhone applications, with their unique challenges and opportunities.

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