Nov 00 Viewpoint
Volume Number: 16
Issue Number: 11
Column Tag: Viewpoint
4D/WebSTAR Summit 2000
By William Porter, POLYTROPE, Houston, Texas
An exclusive MacTech report
The 4D/WebSTAR Summit was held October 4-8 in San Diego, California. The weather
in San Diego was uncharacteristically gloomy throughout the Summit, but inside the
U.S. Grant Hotel, the atmosphere was sunny and warm.
This was the largest gathering of 4D developers ever. According to Mike Erickson of
Automated Solutions Group, co-sponsor with 4D, Inc. of this year's Summit, there
were almost 450 developers in attendance, from two dozen countries. A dozen
third-party vendors displayed their products or services during the Summit. The
three-day program consisted of over 70 sessions. Some of these were presented by
personnel from 4D, Inc. or WebSTAR and a few were given by third-party vendors
who discussed their products. But most were presented by the several dozen
independent developers who ensured that the program was grounded not in marketing
but in practical problem solving. Best of all, there were more new users than ever
before. There was a special track for 4D beginners and a free one-day seminar taught
by Liz Delgado designed to bring newbies rapidly up-to-speed.
4D, Inc., president and CEO Brendan Coveney, in his keynote address, reported that the
state of the company was good indeed. NASA recently purchased an agency-wide site
license for 4D. Projected revenues for fiscal year 2000 come to $28 million, with
operating costs of only $6 million. Revenues have grown 80% in the last two years.
Increased expenditures on marketing are paying off: 4D, the oldest RDBMS for the
Mac, is once again a visible and respected presence in the world of Mac OS database
development.
WebSTAR
The acquisition of Starnine, makers of WebSTAR, in March 2000, overnight made 4D,
Inc. a major web player. If you weren't paying attention at the time, WebSTAR is the
software that the U.S. Army moved its web site to a year ago, after it dumped Microsoft
IIS because of its weak security. Exactly how WebSTAR will play into 4D's long-term
product strategy remains to be seen. While 4D already has outstanding proprietary
tools for web-serving databases, it seems reasonable to expect closer integration
between 4D, Inc.'s database and web-server products in the future. But C.J. Holmes,
formerly of Starnine and now 4D, Inc.'s director of engineering for WebSTAR, assured
me that WebSTAR is not going to be absorbed into 4D as a component, or vice versa.
And in an exclusive interview with MacTECH, Brendan Coveney confirmed this, saying
that 4D, Inc. remains an "open-systems company" and that WebSTAR will continue to
work well with all databases on the Mac. This will be good news for FileMaker Pro
developers using Lasso or the FileMaker Web Companion and for users of other back
ends like Valentina or PrimeBase.
No release date was given, but attendees were given some hints about what to look for
in WebSTAR 5. It was described as a well-behaved application with an instinct for
self-preservation; if a child process dies for any reason, the parent process will start
a new process automatically. WebSTAR 5 will ship with a bunch of new features,
including support for Perl; support for multiple processors; more plug-ins and
services such as calendars, forms processing, etc. Tests run with WebBench show
spectacular improvements in speed: WebSTAR 4.x runs around 50 connections per
second. WebSTAR 5 has been tested at over 420 connections a second or 37 million
connections a day. These are some serious web-serving numbers. Finally, they have
WebSTAR 5's core features running under OS X already as a BSD application.
In honor of the company's new product, there was a special track devoted to WebSTAR
and other issues of interest to web administrators; about 50 attendees registered for
that track specifically. One web administrator attending his first Summit told me that
the presentation on WebSTAR Mail DNS Settings had been worth the price of the
Summit in itself. Other presentations in this track were of a more general nature,
dealing with XML and Perl and a detailed technical discussion of the Internet's
infrastructure. I attended an excellent introduction to XML by developer whose
company publishes a server-side XML interpreter. Why wait for browser support? he
asked. Why indeed?
4D does the Web, too
Almost a third of the presentations at the Summit dealt with the Web. On the 4D side of
the Summit, there were several presentations devoted to the new web features in 4D
6.7 (forthcoming), especially the Web Assistant, the first of the 4D "components.
The Web Assistant makes it easier than ever to build Web sites using 4D alone. The
keynote showed a demo of another component, a tool for building online stores,
code-named "Yapee." (One rumor had it that this is the name of the French developer.)
4D 6.7 supports SSL. A set of extensions for Macromedia Dreamweaver are in
development right now, to give 4D developers the ability to use Dreamweaver's
outstanding web page-design tools to build pages that will display data dynamically
drawn from 4D databases. In our interview, Brendan Coveney told me that 4D, Inc. is
deeply committed to the Web's future, which lies with dynamic, database-driven web
sites.
Other presentations delved into topics like "4D as a WAP Server" and "e-Commerce
with 4D." The latter was presented by the maker of Web Server 4D (WS4D), a
remarkable off-the-shelf web serving and e-commerce application which proves
almost better than anything else how powerful and flexible 4D's programming
language is: WS4D-in many ways a competitor of 4D now-is itself programmed
entirely in 4D! In the "beginner's track," I presented a well-attended session on using
4D as a backend for Lasso-driven sites. Not in the beginner's track, 4D maestro David
Adams gave an advanced full-day seminar in 4D Web techniques after the main part of
the Summit.
4D 6.7 and OS X
In the keynote, Brendan Coveney played a snazzy little game called Time Matrix,
written in 4D by the folks at DataCraft. (DataCraft is the publisher of Foundation, a
brilliantly designed shell widely used by 4D developers.) Time Matrix was run first
under OS 9, then it was run again, under OS X beta. In view of the obvious complexity
of the underlying code, the remarkable thing was not that the second demo sported the
Aqua look, but that not a single line of code had to be rewritten.
The folks at 4D, Inc. are committed to (if not downright obsessed with) making sure
that old systems don't break when new ones are released. I was assured by several
different developers on different occasions that it is possible to open a 1987-vintage
version 1.0 database in the year 2000 under 4D version 6.5 and that it will in all
likelihood run fine with few or no changes. After demonstrating that the core 4D
application itself will make the transition to OS X without a hitch, Coveney went on to
tell developers that 4D, Inc. is working very hard to make sure that it is as easy as
possible for plug-in developers to port their products to OS X.
AreaList Pro is dead. Long live PowerView!
I am not an old-enough hand with 4D to know the story first-hand, but I have heard it
many times from experienced developers. They sit down and get a far-away look when
they start to tell you about it, the way veterans do before talking about The War. It
goes something like this: There used to be a third-party plug-in for 4D called AreaList
Pro, which was relied upon by every serious 4D developer. AreaList provided a set of
life-saving functions not built into 4D, all of them derived from its central trick of
displaying arrays on screen. AreaList was a VBD (very big deal).
Then one dark day, the company that had been publishing AreaList and several other
crucial 4D tools decided that its own business plan no longer included 4D and that it
would stop developing and supporting these tools. To hear the old-timers tell it, it was
like waking up tomorrow to discover that you could not buy gasoline for your
car-anywhere.
At last year's Summit in Chicago, 4D, Inc. promised developers that it would solve the
problem caused by AreaList's death, and this year, they delivered on the promise by
announcing PowerView, a new tool in 6.7 which combines the features of ALP and 4D
Chart (4D's spreadsheet plug-in). The demo of PowerView showed it to be fast and
flexible. One part of the demo consisted of a ballet of formatted table cells that Brendan
Coveney had to assure the audience had not been done in Flash! Several developers I
talked to thought that, while the preview of 4D running under OS X was good news, the
announcement of a replacement for AreaList Pro was the news that mattered most to
them.
To me as a rookie 4D user still spending most of my time on the bench, it was
interesting to discover that there are still companies brave enough to make promises
and at least equally interesting to see a company actually keep them.
Everything Else
The rest of the program was nicely diversified. One presenter in the WebSTAR track
warned his audience that his talk was going to get a bit geeky. He needn't have bothered.
The entire conference was unashamedly geeky. The level of discourse among the
attendees was consistently high. Even the beginners track included presentations likely
to make expert FileMaker users like me sweat a little, such as "Parameter Passing and
Generic Code," "Accelerated Text Parsing with BLOBs," "Pointers on Pointers," and
"Multi-Process Programming." Other presentations on 4D were similarly diversified,
dealing with memory management, interprocess data transfer, and localization of
applications. I was not able to attend the latter, but its presence on the program
reminded me of 4D's international character. 4D, Inc. in the U.S. is a wholly-owned
subsidiary whose parent country is in France. 4D has long provided extraordinary
support for international users, including full-support for double-byte languages like
Chinese and Japanese.
A few of the sessions were bleeding edge. I attended a session on using
speech-recognition and synthesis as a replacement for the conventional UI. The session
was fascinating, especially when the presenter's demo behaved as expected. I left
feeling that I might personally wait a year before worrying about this subject again.
Because you have complete control over the UI (including menus) and because you can
compile your code into double-clickable programs, 4D is a great tool for developing
vertical market applications. A couple panel sessions provided detailed advice for
commercial developers from those who have already been there and done that. I
personally learned that we at Polytrope have been doing almost everything wrong.
Windows?
The casual observer could easily have gotten the impression that this was a convention
attended exclusively by Macintosh users. C.K. Hahn, Senior Director, Developer
Technical Services, Apple Computer, Inc., spoke briefly during the keynote to give
Apple's blessing on 4D, Inc.'s commitment to OS X. Apple sponsored the wonderful
Internet café for Summit attendees, complete with an Airport base station. Many of the
sessions dealt specifically with the Mac OS. My completely unscientific guess is that a
good eighty percent or more of the attendees would consider themselves primarily Mac
OS users. And yet 4D is a cross-platform product. More than that: Brendan Coveney
told me that roughly 75% of their sales are for the Windows platform (mainly 4D
Server for NT boxes)! This paradox leads me to two observations. First, it appears
that developing 4D databases on the Mac and deploying them under Windows is easy and
reliable. If there were a lot of problems in this arrangement, I would have expected to
see at least a couple presentations like "Pot-holes to avoid with the Windows
compiler" or "Memory Management under Windows NT." Second, the market - not just
4D, Inc.'s market, but my market, the developers' market - is Windows.
The Big News
On the last day, I asked everybody I talked to what the big news of the Summit was.
Some said it was the acquisition of WebSTAR by 4D, Inc. Some mentioned PowerView.
Some pointed to the web features of the forthcoming 4D 6.7. Many talked with
excitement about seeing 4D running under OS X. But when I asked Brendan Coveney
what the big news was, he did not hesitate to give me the low-tech answer that I think
is the best of all: "The big news of the Summit is that the 4D community is alive and
growing and the atmosphere is tremendously positive.
Credits and More Information
Many thanks to those credited above and to many others not credited for speaking to me.
Special thanks to John Steele of Elucidata in Fort Worth for his clarifications with
regard to AreaList Pro. The official 4D Summit web site is at
<http://www.4DSummit.com>, but you need a password to get into the really useful
pages. No password is required to get into developer and Summit presenter Bryan
Green's unofficial celebration of the Summit: <http://www.4DSummitnotes.com>.