Morning Keynote Address

The keynote address was scheduled for seven-freaking-forty-five this morning! Man, are we a bunch of hard-core fanatics or what! When I got there the good (caffeinated) coffee was all gone, so I'm flying on decaf... so watch out for my comments today!

Statistics

Brendan Coveney started out the keynote address with some very encouraging statistics. There are 430 conference attendees from 9 countries. Also, there are 45 4D staff members here from 4D, Inc. and4D SA. All of these make this the largest US conference ever. This is absolutely fabulous!

Financials

In his next move which shocked us all, Brendan went on to reveal explicit details about the financial status of the company. He explained that the 4D, Inc. financial period runs from January to December... and then went on to reveal that there had been $28MM in worldwide revenue, with $6MM in operating profits. Furthermore, he revealed that 4D, Inc. has experienced 80% growth in the last 2 years, with a 350% growth in profits paid back to the parent company, 4D SA. This is the very first time that 4D has been so explicit in revealing their financial information, and it is a sign (in my opinion) of their confidence in their own abilities and in their attitude toward us developers. It's nice to be in the loop -- it's been a long time coming. I think it's been a long road since the days of the John Anglim overhead slides with graphs but no hard numbers.

Brendan went 0n to explain that although 4D, Inc. is cutting back on their overall expenses, they are not doing it in areas that affect their customers. In point of fact to this he cited that 4D, Inc. has doubled their budget for technical support and quadrupled their budget for marketing over the last two years.

Brendan also announced that NASA recently signed a site license agreement for both 4D WebSTAR and 4D. He specially thanked Simon Wright for orchestrating this. We all clapped, because that's really cool. Imagine: a big name client like NASA using 4D. It's like the Good Old Days all over again.

Demo database

Then Brendan said that he would show a database demo by DataCraft. Before he started the demo he paused to show two new standard features for all 4D demo databases: the Exit to Design Mode menu and the new About Box. These two items answer the most asked questions about 4D demos: "How do I get to design mode to see the source code?", and "Where do I go for more information?" The About Box has the info on how to sign up for 4D University, and the menu bar has two commands to get into user mode and the design mode.

Then, the demo screwed up! Aarrghh! (To quote Charlie Brown.) Despite the best efforts of all the 4D staff, and especially despite the intrepid efforts of Jim Staples (who stayed up all night setting up the demo despite being under the weather) the demo wouldn't show up on the screen... but, Brendan told us about it . It was going to be a database running on MacOS 9, Windows, and MacOS X -- with no change in the code. Nonetheless, there was big applause for this. [Later in the day, we heard that this demo will be given tomorrow, so watch for more info on this then.]

4D on MacOS

Brendan also talked about 4D on the MacOS. He stressed that 4D, Inc. is committed to the Mac OS and the Carbon API, and he said that third-party plugins should be easy to port. He wants to make your applications able to work on MacOS X from day 1. He said that they have carbonized 4D, and that it's all running okay... with the exception of a few little things. They have an alpha version up and running now, and will provide lots of support to help plugin developers to port their products to the MacOS X version of the 4D environment.

4D WebSTAR on MacOS X

Brendan also talked about 4D WebSTAR (which used to be called just plain WebSTAR.) He said that all WebSTAR products & plugins have been moved to MacOSX. On WebBench (a standard web server benchmark), WebSTAR 4 gets 50 connections per section, while WebSTAR 5 gets 400 connections per second. He said that was the limit of the testbed, and that he figured they could get better numbers later. Lastly, he said that it works out to 37 millon connections per day, and that was using the version that includes the debug code.

He went on to say that the server has been completely rewritten; the core is complete. Their goal is to scale better than Apache. (Wow!) He explained that WebSTAR is a BSD application under MacOS X. It runs as an unprivileged user under BSD. It is self-preserving, and comes up automatically after it crashes. He stressed that it's been engineered to be a very well-behaved application under MacOS X.

Apple makes a showing to talk about 4D WebSTAR V

Brendan then went on to introduce C.K. Hahn, the Senior Director of Developer Technical Support at Apple. C.K. went on to say that MacOS X is a "brand new superhighway that has no cars on it. All the best engineering, etc., is just waiting... and we are looking for people to take advantage of it." He explained further that "carbonizing plugins is easy. When you get to see the demo [referenced earlier], you will see 4D with the aqua interface." He revealed further that "MacOS X is UNIX." He said it has "all the robustness, security, and performance of UNIX." He actually caused me to sputter and snort in laughter when he sais that it was "so easy a 2nd grade teacher can admin it." [Note: I am a big fan of MacOS X, but I think that the full impact of having UNIX as the core of the MacOS has not hit everybody yet. But it will... (insert sinister laugh here)] Lastly, he said that "nobody is shipping [on MacOS X] yet, but be there in early 2001."

Brendan took the microphone again and thanked C.K. and Apple. He went on to say that they have been very helpful. He explained that they were going to reschedule demos during the day, and assured us that it's not all make-believe. Finally, he thanked us and expressed his gratitude.

Mike Erickson then commanded us to go forth and get us to the presentations.

Random Shots

The Annual Tim Hall/Jordi Vila picture.

Every year I take a picture of good friends Tim Hall and Jordi Vila. Jordi has moved rom Barcelona to Northern California to work with the ever-growing Power School development team, so it's nice to have him here as a local! Also, look carefully at Tim Hall's t-shirt -- it's a classic 4D version 2 edition, replete with the triangle motif over the breast pocket and M.C. Escher-esque impossible logo on the back (which you can't see, but is still nostalgic enough to mention).

Jordi Vila (left) and Tim Hall pose for their annual Summit portrait.

Diana Nemirovsky rubs some heads for luck

We caught Diana Nemirovsky rubbing the heads of Rich Gay and Sebastian Frey for luck.

Sebastian Frey (left) waits his turn while Rich Gay indulges Diana Nemirovsky.

Morning Sessions

If Memory Serves Me Right (Steven Willis -- aka Fukui-san)

I sat through Steven Willis's memory presentation. Steven has a lot of practical experience with memory-related issues, and so I decided to be there to provide moral support since 4D memory is sort of a fetish of mine. If you're wondering about the "Fukui-san" reference above, it's from the Japanese television program "Iron Chef". Check it out at http://www.ironchef.com/. It's a hoot.

Steven wows the crowd... if only his own memory will work as well as 4D's...

Putting 4D on the Web with Lasso

William Porter says, "See? Lasso works better with 4D!"

Dave Batton's Foundation Presentation

I also peeked in on Dave Batton presenting his new Foundation 3.7. It's really great to see the premiere shell for 4D making the transition to the new version. Dave has always been the vanguard of user interface in the 4D community, so it's nice to know that his polished work will continue on for Foundation users.

The ever-dapper Dave Batton demos the new Foundation 3.7.

Web Server 4D gets support for Active4D

I stopped by the MDG booth in the vendor area, and found Michael Ginsburg quietly adding support for ASG's new Active4D to Web Server 4D. This captures the spirit of the Summit, I think -- that creative cauldron of a bunch of developers coming together and finding a real synergy and inspiration in the work of our peers. Way to go, Michael! Later on, Aparajita Fishman, the author of Active4D, dropped by to look on.

Aparajita Fishman (left) looks on as Michael Ginsburg adds Active4D support to to Ws4D real-time.

The Internet Café

Now that 4D is once more considered cool on the Macintosh, Apple Computer likes us again. They like us so much that they helped set up an Internet Cafe for us all to use. Thanks, Apple! They loaned us 5 iMacs (one of each in the original berry-flavored colors), and 4D set up 6 spare Ethernet ports for Summiteers to jack in. Note the too-cool Airport base station (also from 4D) for those with laptops and wireless network cards. Aren't we all just a little bit too irradiated... I feel crispy.

Bandwidth-enabled Summiteers cruise the web in the Internet Cafe.

The 4D Web Assistant

I checked out David Robbins' presentation of his Web Assistant, which is the current rendition of his well-known DataWave product. Dave's presentation style is absolutely without compare, beacuse he makes it look so easy -- calm, cool, collected... all this and really great code, too!

A bit on Web Assistant -- it is looking very good, and is the first example of what will undoubtedly be many component libraries that appear in the third-party marketplace.

David Robbins takes some questions from the fans in the crowd.

After he finished demonstrating the Web Assistant, Dave went on to show a really cool Web Calendar demo he's recently put together for 4D, Inc. It's modeled after Yahoo's Calendar, and is really very nice! Dave explained that he was given a two-week budget to complete it, and the design criteria was to use the new 4D 6.7 commands. It's really full-featured for two weeks' effort, and gives some really useful examples of how to use the new HTML-based commands in 4D 6.7.

A closer look at Dave Robbins' Web Calendar demo.

The Vendor Area

I went through the vendor area and took a few pictures!

Lunch

Lunch was great! The main course was a nice chicken in some sort of a sauce, with lots of pasta and a nice salad -- standard big hotel fare. The dessert trays were extremely popular, with many Summiteers carting away lots of eclairs and pieces of cheesecake. Life is uncertain! Eat dessert first!

I spent lunch chatting with Paul Carnine and William McHargue at our table. We spent a little time talking about technical stuff, and a lot of time talking about physics, philosophy, metaphysics, and religion. My mind has been in those areas a lot lately, especially since I have been reading the book "The Elegant Universe" by Brian Greene (no relation). (See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375708111/ for more information.) Since William is a physicist by training and Paul is, well, Paul, it was a very engaging conversation. People like those two are the best part about 4D.

Anyway, lunch was great and many Summiteers spent some of the extra time hanging around the Internet Café and the Vendor Area. The G3 PowerBooks were out in force, and we all sizzled a little extra what with all the wireless packets floating around. I got a slight tan, I think.

John Baughman (foreground) and Brian Farrell code like crazy between sessions!

Afternoon Sessions

Creating Components with Kent Wilbur

Webwoman and I checked out Kent Wilbur's session on Creating Components. I sat next to Tod Gentille and Cyril Harnisch from the SwatTeam. Kent's presentation was pretty good! There's a lot of ground to cover with this new set of features, and Kent did a good job answering the literally dozens of questions about it. Olivier Bouilland from 4D SA jumped in to clarify when necessary, too.

The big Active4D demo

Webwoman and I went to ASG's Active4D demonstration today. Active4D is rad. The demo was crammed, with at least 70 people in there, sitting in the aisles and standing in the back shoulder-to-shoulder. I took a picture of Aparajita Fishman and Mike Erickson demonstrating:

Aparajita Fishman (left) and Mike Erickson gleefully demonstrate Active4D to an overflow crowd.

It's sort of hard to describe Active4D in a nutshell, but I'll try: it is a 4D plug-in that implements 4D syntax within HTML in a manner very similar to Active Server Pages. If you feed Active4D something like this:

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Active 4D Demo</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<% ALL RECORDS ([Invoices])
   ORDER BY ([Invoices];[Invoices]DueDate;>)
   For ($i;1;Records in selection([Invoices]) %>
<P>Invoice #: <% write ([Invoice]Number) %></P>
<% NEXT RECORD ([Invoices])
   End for   %>
</BODY>
</HTML>

You get back out something that looks like this:

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Active 4D Demo</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<P>Invoice #: 1001</P>
<P>Invoice #: 1002</P>
<P>Invoice #: 1003</P>
<P>Invoice #: 1004</P>
<P>Invoice #: 1005</P>
<P>Invoice #: 1006</P>
<P>Invoice #: 1007</P>
</BODY>
</HTML>

I remember being thrilled to learn about Active4D after I had just been evaluating whether it was feasible to implement something like PHP inside of a 4D plug-in -- Active4D fills out the spectrum of 4D web options. On the side of much coding and least HTML is the old NetLink NL_AppendReply -- every change meant a new compile. In the middle is the existant 4D 6.5 HTML web command vocabulary, where limited compiling was necesary... and now on the side of compiling once and then just changing the HTML is Active4D.

For me, Active4D is going to be extremely easy to sell to a client because it means that they can say to their HTML designers, "if you know ASP, you can learn A4D." This is much better than divising my own tags for every new function -- not that there's anything wrong with that, but it sure is nice to have such a nice implementation already built and documented! And, it's all in 4D syntax, something that I already know and can debug.

So, when it becomes available, I highly recommend that you take a look at Active4D. It may not fit your neds right now, but once you've used it, you will see just how much of a lever it gives you -- more functionality in less time; little change necessary to the database server; still the familiar surroundings of 4D but in an HTML environment. And, it works with GoLive, DreamWeaver, and most of the other tools that those artistic types use.

But, enough of the commercial... the crowd did seem responsive to Active4D. David Adams and I did a big plug for it, and Michael Ginsburg told about how he integrated support for it into WS4D in about 20 minutes. The questions that came up were about licensing fees (nothing announced yet), when it would ship (Real Soon, with the public beta program starting on Tuesday), and about how to integrate it into existing databases. Many of the questioners seemed to be still using NetLink, and were looking for a viable alternative. Also, many were looking for an easy way to break out of contextual mode on 4D's web server, to which that answer is that A4D doesn't address that -- it's a dynamic HTML generator, not a session management system, although Aparajita pointed out that you can certainly write one in it.

Speaking of writing in A4D, it supports include files and libraries -- this is very nice. It is possible, for example, to build a collection of A4D methods (which look very similar to 4D methods) and then package them up as a library that is available for use across many web pages.

Some statistics, since many questioners were concerned about performance: Aparajita said that he was getting 30,000 iterations per second through an empty for loop within A4D, which is plenty fast enough for most people.

Aparajita also announced that he will be realeasing a WebSTAR version soon, too, so pretty quick the same type of processing with be available in that environment as well -- and I just bet that it will make the integration a piece of cake.

Setting up Alam's Ricochet

Dinner at the Fish Market

Mehboob Alam had set up a group dinner for his Databasics mailing list users tonight, and so a bunch of us took the hotel van over to the local FIsh Market outlet. It was a lovely evening of eating and chatting. Paul Carnine told a very funny story about how he took a bunch of high school kids across country in an RV on a trip to Area 51, Roswell, and the Very Large Array -- sort of an alien pilgrimage a là MTV Road Rules. Bob Miller told some funny stories about how he helped a lady fix her plumbing after his telephone number got confused with Bob the Handyman's (true story!) Also present were Doug Blew, Liz Delgado, Brian Campbell, Ed "what the" Heckman, Webwoman (Karen Green), Dennis Carnine, Steve Hussey, and a whole host of others whose names I didn't learn -- shame on me! I took a couple of pictures just for fun:

Until tomorrow, then!

We're supposed to see the super-cool demo of 4D running on MacOS X under Aqua tomorrow -- I'll be sure to have something to say about all that! Also, I have some pictures to post from yesterday's party... so much info, so little sleep... Stay tuned...