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The development environment is the 4th Dimension RDBMS with a high level development language and associated products http://www.4D.com. First released in 1984, this is an impressive cross-platform rapid application development (RAD) environment with a very rich user-interface. A compiler ensures fast execution of stand alone or client-server applications. Numerous plug-in modules have been developed to extend the functionality, including spreadsheet, email, wordprocessing, communications, charting among a few.
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This is a client-server application that runs on the server computer and serves data and code to the client workstations. The workstations run a program called 4D Client to execute the user interface and communicate with the server via a TCP/IP based network protocol. 4D Server is not a file server based application, but a data serving application. It is also a html serving application via the built-in web server if required.
Data is loaded from disk and held in RAM for best performance, with modifications flushed to disk every few minutes. A transaction log file is maintained outside the main datafile, allowing rollback of the data if a problem arises. Scheduled backups and mirroring are built-in if required.
The client-server version can be "back ended" by Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server etc. for salability and enterprise wide deployment. Web services (SOAP/XML) and ODBC are built-in, as is a web server and email services.
Enterprise solutions and integration are further discussed in the following PDF file:Enterprise White Paper
EXTRACT:
A recent study by Ventera shows that
4th Dimension had the fastest implementation of all the
products tested (Table 1, page 3). According to the study:
"The 4D Product Line provides end-to-end software including
a Database,Web Server, Application Server, and
Integrated Development Environment (IDE). You can produce
an entire Web site without purchasing any additional
software. I also found the ability to change from a singleuser
application to a client/server application and from a
client/server application to a Web-based application very
interesting. I cannot think of any other tool that enables a
developer to do this."
These results are even more amazing when one considers
that some of the other products analyzed cost more
than twenty times the cost of 4th Dimension.
Similarly, initial development costs count for nothing if
the product is difficult and costly to maintain. A recent
Aberdeen Group study (May 2001) show that solutions
deployed with 4th Dimensions Web architecture cost
about 70% less than the industry average throughout
the lifetime of the project
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