64-bit product line FINAL on Windows
64-bit is the way where everybody needs to go. 64-bit allows you to take advantage of the power of the 64-bit machines and of the latest native system features for your business application.
With 4D v16 R2, 4D has reached a major milestone as 4D Developer Edition and the 4D Volume Desktop Windows 64-bit are now released as “Final” and are thus ready for production.
Start early, use it now and share your feedback through in the beta version forum from 4D Forums!
Sort records by object attribute
At each 4D release, object fields become more and more powerful.
A new 4D command for sorting your record selections according to one or more attributes is now available with 4D v16 R2. The new command ORDER BY ATTRIBUTE works the same as the command ORDER BY; you just have to pass an attribute path by which you want to order your selection – easy!
New rendering engine for Web Area
4D is updating its internal component for embedded Web Area objects for the most up-to-date and well-maintained existing rendering engine. As we want to durably support the state of the art in HTML and JavaScript technology, we are changing to Blink (also used in Google Chrome) for the Web Area for all 4D 64-bit versions.
Customize highlight color upon listbox row selection
A new step is reached to provide our developers with a fully customizable listbox object, entirely adaptable to user need. A new option is available in the listboxes that will allow to improve final interfaces: this option is called “Hide selection highlight”.
With just one click this option can be activated. Once activated, the system highlight will be completely invisible.
New Enterprise feature: support of Virtual Machine snapshots
If your users are running your application as a virtualized application, chances are high they use VMWare vSphere (Hypervisor ESXi) and are using snapshots.
4D v16 R2 will automatically install a VSS writer service. VSS stands here for Volume Shadow Copy Service. When the VMWare administrator starts a snapshot, VMWare informs the guest, which informs the VSS writer, which will inform 4D Server to flush the cache and wait for one second. Then it will inform the OS that the .4DD, .4DIndx and .Journal files belong together and must be snapshot at the same time. The OS will handle this and 4D Server can continue to handle client requests. The “freeze” lasts around a second, usually not even noticed by connected users.
4D Write Pro – Horizontal Ruler
With 4D v16 R2 you can display a graphical horizontal ruler at the top of the 4D Write Pro area ! Thanks to this horizontal ruler, the text can be easily formatted.
Prior to the existence of this graphic ruler, tabulations could only be managed by programming or using the 4D Write Pro interface widget. From now (4D v16 R2 and above), when the ruler is displayed (this is optional) the final user will have the opportunity to manage margins and tabulations easily and graphically.
Take Control of the Cache Manager
4D v16 introduced a new fully optimized cache manager for the 64-bit product line. 4D v16 R2 is giving power to our advanced 4D developers to take control by themselves!
The cache manager internal algorithm is based on a priority concept associated to each object type to store in the cache memory. By default, the cache manager algorithm assigns a higher priority value for an index than for records. And recently used objects (records or indexes) have a higher priority to remain in the cache than objects that have not been used in the last two days, etc…
Web Server in preemptive mode
We are moving forward with 4D v16 on preemptive multi-threading as the 4D Web Server is also becoming preemptive. Just click one checkbox and your application will support more simultaneously connected users, and process more requests in parallel. For requests using a lot of CPU time, execution can be up to 2 times faster!
Boost your performance with the new cache manager
The 4D v16 version has definitely been designed for better performance and scalability. In addition to major features like preemptive multi-threading, 4D v16 64-bit is embedding a brand new cache manager for a optimized handling of objects in cache memory avoiding any fragmentation issues.
The new cache manager improves the usage of very large cache for modern computers (with 64 or even 128 GB of Cache) allowing to take advantage of low RAM prices to have even large databases fully in memory. It also improves the situation of small cache size with very large data files, by decreasing the amount of unloading memory with increased support of priorities for data objects to be hold or released from cache.
MSC now helps you to find deprecated images
QuickDraw/QuickTime pictures (PICT format) are deprecated since 4D v11 and must be replaced by modern picture formats (such as PNG or JPEG). New 64-bit versions of 4D no longer support PICT images. So the challenge is to find them in your old applications.
Contact us
Got a question, suggestion or just want to get in touch with the 4D bloggers? Drop us a line!
* Your privacy is very important to us. Please click here to view our Policy