Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
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>4D is a commercial company that has a high level framework that sits on top of their RDBMS technology. They have a
new version that allows you to access data in many new places: iPhone, Gears,
HTML 5 APIs, AIR and Flex.
Check out the online demos such as a drag and drop shopping cart, or the Gears enabled personal tracker.
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Seems ok, but the demo’s arent going that smooth :9
The demos are pathetically counterintuitive; with the shopping cart you have to drop items onto a piece of clip-art, instad of the target list itself; and the scrolling catalogue list just seems like a clumsy reimplementation of something the browser already does perfectly well.
The demos run so slow that hurts. Ok, maybe the demos are only to show how things works, but I think that if the demos are ugly, why the hell the code will be better?
From what I can see, these are very good demos for programmers. Especially the way they explain how each demo is implemented. I also like the fact that it shows many of the small implementation on a specific feature. I think it is easy for programmers to follow these types of demo. Personal planner demo is definitely cool. I just went through it and I’m definitely inspired. I love the fact that it is Adobe Air and iPhone support.
Looks like the Personnal Planner is the real demo here, the others just show how to use the API. The demo is running fine here on Safari on OSX.
It seems to be working in disconnected mode too, it stores offline data using Gears. Looks like HTML5 is supported as well.
If I’m to understand correctly, the demos show typical out-of-the-box functionality that people with 4D-based apps can use. I’ve yet to be blown away by any WYSIWYG framework, so nothing floats my boat there.
I’m guessing this stuff is of more interest to 4D programmers who want to turn their existing projects into Ajax apps. Looking at their web site, they keep promising stuff like “no additional code,” so I would wager this isn’t for typical web app developers.
But the planner demo looks like it’s crazy customized, like what you could do if you teamed up a 4D programmer and someone who knew what they were doing with Ajax development. I don’t know about all the blood and guts, but visually and look-and-feel wise, it makes me want to learn more. Better looking than most Google apps, AFAIC.