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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Full Database Insight Through the Lens of a Single Method – Bruno Raeymaekers

Posted on August 7, 2024 by 4DMethod

Wednesday, August 14, 2024, 12:00 noon, CDT (UTC−5:00) Download .ics

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Full Database Insight Through the Lens of a Single Method – Bruno Raeymaekers

While the graphical interface of the 4D database structure is great for getting an overview of the existing tables and fields, once you get to over a hundred tables, it can be awkward to find out certain details like endpoints of relations and definitions of composite indices. Good thing we have the 4D language and flexible interface capabilities to add new perspective to complicated application data structures!

In this user group meeting, Bruno Raeymaekers will give us a fresh look at all the details of your database structure.

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4D Info Report Component – Thomas Schlumberger

Posted on June 27, 2024 by 4DMethod

Wednesday, July 3, 2024, 12:00 noon, CDT (UTC−5:00) Download .ics

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4D Info Report Component – Thomas Schlumberger

4D applications play a central role in supporting businesses and institutions around the world… around the clock. That makes it important to understand how the applications are performing in order to tune the code, hardware and networking accordingly for optimal operation.

Out of the box, 4D gives us the Administration Window, which offers an overall view of how the application is running at this very moment. But what if you are, perhaps, not around to look at the Administration Window when an anomaly happens? Maybe users are experiencing slow responses during specific times of the day? Some problems, like memory leaks, build up over days or weeks depending on the situation. What if you are called in to help with an application that you know nothing about?!?

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Master Action Building with GitHub – Milan Adamov

Posted on April 24, 2024 by 4DMethod

Wednesday, May 1, 2024, 12:00 noon, CDT (UTC−5:00) Download .ics

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Master Action Building with GitHub – Milan Adamov

Project mode in 4D gave us proper version control and was a tremendous step forward for the 4D development environment. Every slightest change in the design environment is reflected in various source files in the project folder, which can be more easily tracked to know what changed in the application when and see the history of such changes over the evolution of the codebase.

Many developers choose to use Git for distributed version control of their 4D projects and GitHub as a centralized site providing storage and management of their application source code. As your development efforts, team, and user base all increase in size, you may need to take advantage of Github’s more advanced features for Continuous Integration/ Continuous Delivery (CI/CD).

CI/CD means introducing more automation in building, testing and deployment, and with Github Actions and 4D you have a veritable toolset to streamline your application production! In this meeting, Milan Adamov will show off some of the master action building skills he has used to provide complex application building and deployment for large scale development projects.

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