My 2 cents - Yea I still lurk here, but haven’t touch 4D in a couple years.
First I have done very little 4D desktop application development, at least in
the GUI. I had someone else do that and only got into Active4D when my
developer needed help putting up a web presence.
I think the only reason 4D still exists is that the GUI is probably still one
of the best for developing a GUI application with a database behind it. If you
don’t need the GUI (a staff that feeds the GUI), it is probably one of the
worst choices for doing a web presence, for all of the mentioned problems:
Cost - License
Learning - experience.
Horrible language (I always referred to it as a poor implementation of
Pascal - from the Apple II days)
etc.
Before I retired about 5 years ago, we tried to get off of 4D, but didn’t get
there. Now that they have finally replaced me with a new web developer, they
may get there. In my spare time I rewrote most of the 4D application in a throw
away prototype using RoR, including things that were only done in the GUI. We
didn’t need the GUI, but were stuck with it without the time/manpower to move
to something else - stuck, stuck, stuck. They are now going to start with whats
good in my prototype and start another Rails/Postgres attempt.
Active4D is a great tool if you are stuck - I’ve often said that it makes
writing 4D code almost bearable. Collections alone make it worthwhile. I also
agree with some of Peter Gutbrod’s comments that there are shortcomings.
Without fusebox, I would have retired earlier, but is getting long in the tooth.
About three years ago I attempted something I called Restful Active4D. It was
an attempt to hide fusebox and act more like modern MVC frameworks. It used
fusebox, but again hid or masked most of the switches/setting files. It also
attempted to talk to the database using an ActiveRecord like ui. It worked,
but as Aparajita can probably attest to, I not a very good programmer, I was
just a manager and who had a part-time task of web development. Putting a
pretty face on fusebox (or inventing/adopting another MVC approach) may help.
I still play around with Rails and have gotten better with it. I did .erb (php
like <%%> <%=%> tags for years and then found out most rails developers had
moved to HAML or SLIM. That changed productivity greatly. No more missing tags
(replaced with syntax error for improper format!). HAML and SLIM are just
pre-processors (I think) that converts a tabbed/indentation format to
[erb,phi,a4d].
For example, this a4d code:
<h3>Edit Vendor</h3>
<div class="border-box">
<%
$submitAction := "Update"
$form_action := rest.controller_path("Vendors";num($attributes{"id"}))
include("_form.a4d")
%>
</div>
Would be written using slim as:
h3 Edit Vendor
.border-box
- $submitAction := "Update"
- $form_action := rest.controller_path("Vendors";num($attributes{"id"}))
- include(“_form.a4d")
Maybe the slim parser could be ported to Active4D - yea, I know its work, but
at least worth looking into.
Slim web page: http://slim-lang.com
You can convert <%%> html to slim online at http://html2slim.herokuapp.com. Try
it with some of your .a4d code!
my 0.02.dollars.to_cents
Steve
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