4D is moving forward to provide you with a full Altura-free Windows product line. This will allow us to internally use some modern technologies and make you benefit from it, such as support of Single Document Interface (SDI) windows for instance.
End of last year, we did a first announcement to share with you how we will proceed with the removal of Altura. With 4D v16 R2, we have delivered the Altura-free final version of 4D Developer Edition and 4D Volume Desktop Windows 64-bit. The last step is 4D Server, and this will happen in a near future. We are actually going to remove Altura library from 4D Server Windows 64 bits in a coming 4D v16 R-release.
What is Altura? Similar to Carbon for macOS, 4D used a legacy library named Altura on Windows. Many years ago, Altura was very important for migrating 4D and 3rd party plug-in code from Mac to Windows.
What does it change?
Features using deprecated technology will not work anymore – and some older plugins needs to be updated.
Some old technology based features, such as QuickDraw images or Mac resources were deprecated a long time ago. See Deprecated and Removed Features manual for the complete list.
Plugins using Altura or built with an old plug-in SDK (prior to v14) will no longer be supported by 4D Server. If you are using third party legacy plugins, we recommend that you check with your provider whether your plugin will remain compatible.
4D plugins such as 4D for OCI and 4D ODBC Pro are not using Altura, 4D Internet Commands is no longer relying on Altura since 4D v16 R2 and 4D Pack has been removed (feature set now included in 4D itself).
4D Write and 4D View are still needing Altura to run and will no more be compatible with 4D Server Windows 64-bit.
What are the replacement solutions?
4D Write Pro is now ready to replace 4D Write, 4D v16 R2 brought the horizontal ruler that was highly requested to complete the feature set. Real table support will be available at the same time as the Altura-free 4D Server and will drastically enhance the functional set provided by the old 4D Write.
Display of records in lists 4D View feature is already available in 4D View Pro. For many use cases the feature set available with 4D View Pro exceeds the old 4D View.
4D View Pro spreadsheet feature is coming soon. Actually our implementation is based on a ready-to-use third-party product embedded in 4D that will be totally transparent for the developer and the end-user. The first set of spreadsheet functionalities will be released at the same time as the Altura-free 4D Server, so in the near future. Stay tuned!
If you really do not have any other choice but to use 4D Write and 4D View as you need more time to rewrite your application, as a last workaround, you may reroute your routines previously executed on server to a 32-bit client machine.