4D Summit 2018 which took place in Paris and Washington DC recently, was filled with huge product announcements and a plethora of exciting sessions. It was a great experience for everyone who was able to attend! More than 450 attendees were on site to witness a lot of incredible revelations. 

In this blog post, we’ll recap the highlights from this year’s 4D Summit.

 

keynote day 1

The keynote of the first day was breathtaking as the 4D team revealed two new major features to join the 4D product line:

ORDA

An astonishing feature was announced: ORDA (Object Relational Database Access). It’s the biggest feature set we ever had … in over 30 years! Your code can be written in an object-oriented mode, and you can easily navigate through your entire data model. The keynote was followed by a master class given by Laurent Ribardière, where he went into its benefits and what can be done with it. It’ll open a whole world of possibilities because the way you handle data will never be the same again!

4D for iOS 

Another exciting solution was announced to help you extend your 4D applications to mobile. 4D For iOS, which is fully integrated into 4D, means that you can easily create a new mobile projet directly from 4D. This eliminates the need of any prior expertise for building a native iOS app! More details are coming soon on the 4D Blog. Stay tuned!

 

Keynote day 2

In this keynote, the attendees witnessed the creation of a complex (yet beautifully designed) travel brochure with 4D Write Pro …. programmatically. Including a clean and elegant toolbar created with nothing but standard actions! And as grand finale of the keynote, Laurent Esnault, VP of Engineering, gave a sneek peek behind the curtain with a first look at 4D v18: source control support!

Let’s see the big headlines of this second day:

4D Write Pro

With all the features shipped in 4D Write Pro, creating complex documents is a breeze! And the online Demo we saw just confirmed it. 
4D Write Pro has an unlimited number of uses. You can programmatically generate catalogs, invoices, and reports or send automatic emails or run batches on the server at night … without any user intervention. And in order to help you migrate from 4D Write to 4D Write Pro, we’ve got extensive demos and blog posts for you. Get ready for the future.

Sdi (Single document interface)

User experience is enhanced thanks to SDI mode, the #1 requested feature on Windows. Numerous benefits to users were listed such as simplicity to access files on the desktop, switch between multiple applications on the same screen, and your application can take full advantage of the virtual desktop made of multiple screens. Just activate SDI mode with a single checkbox and take your applications to the next level!

Source control

People were dazzled with the special sneak peek of version control support (scheduled for 4D v18)! Exporting to text format which is supported by versioning tools will be possible. This will allow you to collaborate across projects by comparing, archiving, and restoring your sources! 

 

other highlights

4D View Pro was presented during the first day’s keynote. It’s integrated in 4D with the same license as the 4D View plugin, and it allows you to create advanced lists and spreadsheets! 4D Summit 2018 covered other topics related to: security with numerous implementations to help you secure your environment; as well as productivity and how you can write better code, faster thanks to new development tools! You can also create a customized monitoring dialog thanks to new commands to help you retrieve a list of connected users and running processes, as well as active licenses. But that’s not all, the source code of many dialogs used inside 4D are shared, allowing you to customize, enhance, or rewrite them from scratch. And last but not least, say hello to dynamic forms which can be built on the fly and are fully adapted to your users’ needs!

 

… Final toughts

This year’s 4D Summit was full of awe-inspiring announcements and tons of great demos. Videos of some of the technical keynotes will soon be published on the 4D Blog! It was a real pleasure to meet each of you, and we hope to see even more of the fantastic 4D community at the next 4D Summit!

On behalf of the 4D team, I would like to thank everyone that made this 4D Summit spectacular. And remember, the best is yet to come!