AI Coding with 4D and VS Code: A Practical Guide
If you recently watched our webinar on AI coding with 4D 21, you saw how we built a complete travel agency application (database structure, data, forms, and an AI-powered feature) built almost entirely through natural language prompts. In this post, we’ll walk you through the setup and show you how to bring that same workflow to your own projects.
4D 21 LTS is Here
4D 21 LTS, the most feature-rich version of 4D to date, is now available.
Over the past two years, 4D has moved forward at an exceptional pace. Feature releases introduced major foundations across AI, networking, security, data modeling, web integration, and developer tooling. These innovations were not isolated improvements. They reshaped how applications are built, extended, and maintained over the long term.
Session handling in 4D Qodly Pro
Ever wanted full control over what happens when a user’s session expires, without wrestling with fixed behaviors or bolting on your own timeout logic? Not by maintaining custom timers, juggling tokens, or hoping the UI guesses what the backend is doing?
Session handling in 4D Qodly Pro gives you a pair of application events you can wire into your own UX. One warns the user before the cutoff, the other fires when the session is officially gone. You decide what they trigger.
Enhance your Desktop Interface with Web widgets using 4D Qodly Pro
Ever wanted to enrich your user interface with widgets known from websites, such as a navigation map? Not by learning JavaScript and dealing with CSS and HTML and fighting to pass data between these two worlds?
A new integration between Web Areas and 4D Qodly Pro allows you to deliver rich, dynamic interfaces within your 4D forms while keeping all your business logic inside 4D Server.
Embed Qodly pages in a 4D web area without extra cost
With 4D 21, a new opportunity opens up: seamlessly embed a Qodly page inside a web area on a 4D form with no additional 4D Client license required. Powered by 4D Qodly Pro, you now have full access to a new generation of modern, dynamic user interfaces. No need to choose between desktop and web forms anymore: combine both, and evolve at your own pace.
Give AI to a 30 years old 4D application
In just a couple of years, Artificial Intelligence has gone from an emerging trend to an essential component of modern software. ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, and other AI assistants now play a major role in everyone’s daily life, both professionally and personally.
That’s why 4D 21 introduces 4D.Vectors and 4D AI Kit: to give 4D developers simple, effective tools to add AI-powered features to their applications.
We’ve already shared many examples, tutorials, and webinars about AI, but I recently wondered: what would it take to bring AI into a 30-year-old 4D application?
Could you simply ask such an app for your top 10 customers and instantly get a nice chart back?
Well, guess what? It turned out to be so straightforward that it deserves its own blog post.
ORDA – Handle an event-driven logic during database operations
This feature keeps going on with a new paradigm: handle data in an event-driven way. The 4D 21 provides a complete series of events related to database operations (save or drop).
ORDA events can replace triggers and offer many more advantages: more control, allowing you to code your business logic (including time consuming jobs such as printing invoices or storing external data) directly in an ORDA data class function. They respond to events on data level such as new, modify, save, drop (CRUD)
ORDA events offer precise granularity and sophisticated error handling, leading to a strong data integrity and a better code organisation.
Discover how to implement the appropriate business logic in each step of a save or drop action.
ORDA – Permissions – Restrict / allow web access to the resources in one click
Discover here, how, in web processes, you can protect your resources (data + business logic) from malicious accesses and from unauthorized users … in one click.
In development mode, set the Restrict access by default property to FALSE to concentrate on your code organization, data model, Qodly pages architecture, tests … without any restriction to use data or to call functions.
When ready to implement user profiles, just set the Restrict access by default property to TRUE to ensure nobody will access your data and business logic without being explicitly authorized.
Goodbye 4D Internet Commands – Hello Modern Internet Integration
With the release of 4D 21, we’re officially saying goodbye to the 4D Internet Commands plugin, a long-standing companion for many developers since the early days of the internet. But this isn’t just the end of an era. It’s the beginning of a more secure, more powerful, and more enjoyable way to handle internet communications in 4D.
You can still continue using 4D Internet Commands in version 20 with 4D 21. So, why make the switch? Because the new built-in classes are not just replacements, they’re a complete rethinking of how internet protocols should be handled in a modern development environment. They’re native, thread-safe, and designed to meet today’s standards in security, performance, and flexibility.
Event Report in 4D Qodly Pro: See Every Interactions at a Glance
Creating browser based user interface with 4D Qodly Pro is very similar to use the 4D form editor. Clicking a button calls a 4D method, as you are used to work. And the method executes your (often already existing) business logic.
To do so, you define events, either for widgets or the whole page (form). Browsers work a little different than a desktop app, so there are additional events and the execution sequence might be different. Events Reports help you to better understand this.
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