4D AI Platform – the Future Is Now – Ricardo Mello and Mathieu Ferry

Posted on October 28, 2025 by 4DMethod

Wednesday, November 5, 2025, 12:00 noon, CST (UTC−6:00) Download .ics

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4D AI Platform – the Future Is Now – Ricardo Mello and Mathieu Ferry

4D has been valued as a Rapid Application Development tool since back in the 80s giving developers the capability to get a working prototype of a technical solution in front of prospective clients quicker than the competition. The platform gives you the ability to deliver modern, performant applications that integrate well with other systems without needing to write low level code for complicated system libraries.

Today 4D continues keeping developers in front of the pack with its focus on AI in 4D 21. With the release of the component AI Kit, 4D is making it easier and easier to deliver remarkable AI powered functionality to your users without you needing to go back to school for another degree!

Ricardo Mello and Mathieu Ferry will join us in this meeting to demo new and upcoming AI features available in 4D today and even more with 4D 21.

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Cron – It’s about time! – Koichi Harada

Posted on September 8, 2025 by 4DMethod

Wednesday, September 17, 2025, 12:00 noon, CDT (UTC−5:00) Download .ics

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Cron – It’s about time! – Koichi Harada

4D apps are running 24 hours a day/ 7 days a week all over the world, and often they need to execute tasks on a regular basis in the background without user or administrative action. These tasks could be related to maintenance, reporting, importing, exporting, notifications, data checks and fixes, date related events, and so on. The tasks are as varied as the applications themselves.

I, for one, cannot operate without a schedule, and neither can my applications. Many of us have written our own variety of scheduler modules, which normally have a control process running around the clock that checks a list of jobs and fires them off when necessary. This is a very common need, which deserves a very common solution.

Release the daemons! Koichi Harada’s open source Cron component provides a modern, class based, simple yet powerful solution for all of your scheduling needs!

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List As Objects – Bruno Raeymaekers

Posted on June 11, 2025 by 4DMethod

Wednesday, June 18, 2025, 12:00 noon, CDT (UTC−5:00) Download .ics

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List As Objects – Bruno Raeymaekers

The ability to use lists is an important tool in the hand of every software developer. In it’s purest form, the concept of lists is simple: you have a “subject” (the list itself), and you can relate “topics” (list items), or even other “subjects” (in case of a hierarchical lists) to it.

But what if you need something more? What if you could enhance a list item with an unlimited number of attributes to give it more meaning? What if you could add more potential to the list itself by adding an object to it to capture related data to be used in your project?

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Beautiful Documentation Made Easy – Jim Kerver

Posted on April 24, 2025 by 4DMethod

Wednesday, April 30, 2025, 12:00 noon, CDT (UTC−5:00) Download .ics

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Beautiful Documentation Made Easy – Jim Kerver

Inspired by the 4D Method presentation Building developer.4d.com, let’s dive deeper into Docusaurus and how to set up a documentation website for yourself.

Documentation is always a chore, but by using Obsidian and Docusaurus, it can be made beautiful and maintained practically by using Git. Check out the example website here.

In this presentation, Jim Kerver will take you through the steps of setting up your own Docusaurus website, customize it for your brand, and deploy it for free via GitHub Pages.

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Special Event! – Visual Studio Code for 4D Developers: Code, Debug and Copilot – Mathieu Ferry and Damien Fuzeau

Posted on March 29, 2025 by 4DMethod

Wednesday, April 2, 2025, 12:00 noon, CDT (UTC−5:00) Download .ics

Special Event!
Visual Studio Code for 4D Developers: Code, Debug and Copilot – Mathieu Ferry and Damien Fuzeau

4D has always come with a very capable Code Editor in its Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that has a wide set of features for highly productive application development such as intelligent code completion, code navigation, debugging, searching, macros, and more.

Since the introduction of Project Mode, where each piece of code (method, class…) is stored in external text files, 4D has been adding features to support using other code editing environments such as Visual Studio Code (aka VS Code.) VS Code is an extremely popular, free IDE for Windows, Linux, macOS that includes embedded version control with Git, debugging and many useful extensions that add functionality. You can super-charge your 4D application development capabilities by leveraging some of the features available in VS Code but not yet in the 4D IDE, like integrated source control and GitHub Copilot.

In this 4DMethod special event, Mathieu Ferry and Damien Fuzeau join us to demonstrate how to use VS Code in your 4D application development. This will be a great opportunity for the 4D developer community to give feedback directly to 4D about current integration with VS Code and to discuss upcoming potential features that 4D is considering for its IDE.

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4D and AI – Bring the Power of LLMs to Your 4D Applications – Ricardo Mello

Posted on February 27, 2025 by 4DMethod

Wednesday, March 5, 2025, 12:00 noon, CST (UTC−5:00) Download .ics

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4D and AI – Bring the Power of LLMs to Your 4D Applications – Ricardo Mello

Artificial Intelligence? We can do better than that: Ricardo Mello!!!… talking about integrating your 4D applications with LLMs 😀

You too can not only be trendy by marketing your application using popular buzzwords, but also leverage some very powerful resources to speed your development and provide your users with modern assistance features.

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Enable Data Change Tracking – Keisuke Miyako

Posted on January 9, 2025 by 4DMethod

Wednesday, January 22, 2025, 12:00 noon, CST (UTC−5:00) Download .ics

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Enable Data Change Tracking – Keisuke Miyako

I often hear myself repeating… “Syncing is hard.” Data replication is a common requirement for a variety of different application architecture requirements, be it offline access for mobile apps, offloading data access away from your production server for security reasons or reporting needs, or even for load balancing in a high traffic environment. It can be very challenging to replicate every single data update into a separate datastore. Thankfully we recently got some new tools for making this problem easier to manage!

Native data change tracking is a relatively new feature in 4D, being included in the 4D 20 R3 release. So many new features become available with each R version that you might have missed this game changing update. And it is relatively easy to set up once you know how it works.

At long last, Keisuke Miyako will join us to present this not-to-be-missed demo. Keisuke is one of the most prolific 4D developers ever, with over 600 open source projects in his GitHub repository. In this session, Keisuke Miyako will explain how the feature works, how it differs from journaling or mirroring, how to manage collisions, and more.

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Dynamically Constructing ORDA Queries with a JSON-Based Query Framework – Juan Carlos Perez

Posted on November 5, 2024 by 4DMethod

Wednesday, November 20, 2024, 12:00 noon, CST (UTC−5:00) Download .ics

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Dynamically Constructing ORDA Queries with a JSON-Based Query Framework – Juan Carlos Perez

In the realm of database management systems, the ability to dynamically construct and execute queries is paramount for flexibility and efficiency. Thankfully, using ORDA in 4D applications gives us a powerful approach to optimizing the search of complicated data structures.

In this meeting, Juan Carlos Perez will introduce a framework designed to leverage ORDA queries through a JSON-based query storage mechanism.

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4D Times Faster – Automating 4D deployments using Gitlab CI/CD Pipelines – James Scott and Jeff Kain

Posted on September 26, 2024 by 4DMethod

Wednesday, October 2, 2024, 12:00 noon, CDT (UTC−5:00) Download .ics

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4D Times Faster – Automating 4D deployments using Gitlab CI/CD Pipelines –  James Scott and Jeff Kain

Since 1979, Sweetwater Sound has turned millions of music makers like you into friends by delivering uncommon service and unparalleled expertise. Their dedication has helped Sweetwater become the #1 online retailer of pro audio and music instruments in the United States.

From the beginning, Sweetwater has used 4D as its platform to build its Customer Relationship Management application. This CRM application currently supports over 1,200 clients and has a 22/7 uptime.

In this user group meeting, James Scott and Jeff Kain will present Sweetwater’s journey from Binary Mode to Project Mode, which enabled the orderly transition from monthly release deployments to Daily and On-Demand Release Deployments using GitLab Automation Pipelines, custom GOLang programs, self-hosted GitLab Runners, and Git Source Control.

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Terra Universal Opportunity

Posted on August 22, 2024 by 4DMethod

Terra Universal, a world-class manufacturer and distributor of cleanrooms and related equipment to technically-oriented clients, seeks experienced 4D Developers to work remotely as consultants to continue expanding its 4D-based enterprise management system.

Check out the details in the 4DMethod Jobs page!

Update: The posting generated a terrific amount of interest, and the position is now filled. Check back to the Jobs page for more great opportunities in the future.

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