Using AI and 4D Qodly Pro to Modernize 4D Desktop Applications – Ayoub Metwalli

Posted on July 22, 2026 by 4DMethod

Wednesday, July 29, 2026, 12:00 noon, CDT (UTC−5:00) Download .ics

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Using AI and 4D Qodly Pro to Modernize 4D Desktop Applications – Ayoub Metwalli

Finding the perfect component that satisfies a project requirement and/or provides modern interface capabilities can be pretty sweet. You might even take a look around the new 4D Corner site to see what there is to offer and even post your own awesome components there. Plenty of such extensions that offer new capabilities to the native 4D language and interface are out there just waiting for you to find them.

But as Ferris Bueller once said, “Life moves pretty fast….” Existing plugins and components may only get you part of the way there or not be exactly what your customer requested. Thankfully, now you can easily make your own new components for your app, exactly to specification, using Web Areas, 4D Qodly Pro, and the help of your preferred AI assistant, such Claude or Chat GPT.

Ayoub Metwalli will join us in this user group meeting to show off how you can modernize older 4D desktop application interfaces by incrementally upgrading your UI with 4D Qodly Pro and Web Areas. Turn your app into a state of the art web application one interface area at a time.

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Taking AI Kit off the Grid – How to build your own private semantic search engine – Keisuke Miyako

Posted on June 4, 2026 by 4DMethod

Wednesday, June 10, 2026, 12:00 noon, CDT (UTC−5:00) Download .ics

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Taking AI Kit off the Grid – How to build your own private semantic search engine – Keisuke Miyako

“How does your application use AI?” Heard that question recently? I sure have! We are all living through a major change in the world of technology, and as application developers ourselves, we are expected to deploy AI features as soon as possible or risk falling behind the competition and/or be viewed as, brace yourself, old and outdated.

We have already seen a great demonstration of integrating a 4D application with AI last year with Ricardo Mello and Mathieu Ferry’s fantastic presentation, 4D AI Platform – the Future Is Now. Their demo showed how to add AI chat into an app to perform searches, generate reports, and serve other useful enquiries. However the best AI chat style functionality is still powered by cloud services like Claude.ai and ChatGPT. Cloud-based APIs are convenient and capable, but there are issues to consider with tying your application to them such as cost, vendor lock-in, and privacy.

What about taking AI off the grid instead?!?

Keisuke Miyako returns to the user group to deliver a tour de force presentation (as per usual but especially so in this case) on how to run your own local LLM, including model considerations and setup configuration, to provide semantic search functionality in 4D applications that leverages 4D AI Kit and 4D.Vector search capabilities. “A privately hosted open-source model, running entirely on your own hardware, is producing results in the same range as a state-of-the-art cloud API. No API key, no data leaving your machine, no per-token billing.”

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Cool Stuff You Can Do With 4D Write Pro – Pat Bensky

Posted on April 15, 2026 by 4DMethod

Wednesday, April 22, 2026, 12:00 noon, CDT (UTC−5:00) Download .ics

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Cool Stuff You Can Do With 4D Write Pro – Pat Bensky

In this meeting, we welcome back the coolest cat in the 4D community… a cat named Pat. Pat Bensky has been developing CatBase since the 80’s. CatBase is a database publishing software that turns spreadsheets and databases into ready‑to‑print catalogues, price lists, and directories. Pat will give us a behind the scenes tour of how she unleashes 4D Write Pro to deliver the great functionalities her users have come to rely on.

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BWEB + AI: Rapid development of web applications with 4D – Jean-Michel Biraghi

Posted on February 18, 2026 by 4DMethod

Wednesday, March 4, 2026, 12:00 noon, CST (UTC−6:00) Download .ics

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BWEB + AI: Rapid development of web applications with 4D – Jean-Michel Biraghi

Logo of BSpoke featuring stylized, turquoise lettering.

How can you create a dynamic, modern, responsive, high-performance, secure, and maintainable web portal in 2026 without investing in any technology other than 4D, without modifying your existing code, and without spending hundreds of hours on it? BSPOKE aims to address these multiple challenges with its BWEB component, originally designed for its own needs, but now available in beta version ahead of its upcoming commercial release.

BWEB allows you to deploy a web application for an unlimited number of users thanks to the 4D Web Server license. The interface is full-web, low-code, and WYSIWYG, and the application is multi-domain and multi-language by default.

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Advanced Application Signing – Milan Adamov

Posted on January 9, 2026 by 4DMethod

Wednesday, January 14, 2026, 12:00 noon, CST (UTC−6:00) Download .ics

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Advanced Application Signing – Milan Adamov

As developers of applications that run on Macs and Windows machines, we have to play by the rules of each of the platforms. Both operating systems are constantly improving security, and part of tightening down the system is requiring applications to be signed by registered developers. This way the OS can deter potentially harmful softwares from being downloaded or running on your system.

Application signing is close to be mandatory on macOS already, and Windows is becoming stricter with every release. Apple made the signing process pretty straight-forward on macOS and really cheap. Microsoft is catching up with the introduction of Azure trusted signing about a year and a half ago. Both of them offer a convenient signing process that can be easily automated.

In this demo, Milan Adamov will demonstrate how can you setup and use both of the singing services manually on a local computer and as well via Github actions worklows. It might be worthwhile to review his last demo to be able to follow this one in step… Master Action Building with GitHub – Milan Adamov

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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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