ACI US’s 4th Dimension (4D) has a bit more than half the Macintosh relational database market in the United States and a near stranglehold on the European counterpart. The program has survived and beaten back a half-dozen serious competitors over the years — so successfully that ACI US’s only hope of market expansion is on the other side of the fence, in the Windows domain.
So the latest version of 4D represents a shift of focus — to cross-platform development — and the solution to scores of nagging technical problems in database porting. Because the Windows-based systems don’t have uniform Apple-defined display standards, for example, the 4D language now includes a Scale command to resize screens for optimum display resolution when an application is ported. You simply set the projects target platform in the Preferences dialog box... The 4D Transporter utility automatically handles the somewhat gooey details of file-structure conversion between Mac and Windows databases (Windows doesn’t have the Mac data-fork/resource-fork file structure). Quick Reports that are defined on one side of the platform fence work without modification on the other side, and ACI US has written its own 4D command set for managing cross-platform picture compression — an issue on which there’s not much agreement between Apple and Microsoft. Needless to say, 4D Server (purchased separately) has been rewritten to accept all this harmony and is available in a Windows version.
Windows Touches
As you would expect, developers of popular 4D-based Mac apps for small-office accounting and management are already porting their programs to Windows. But 4D 3.5 has also attracted brand-new Windows developers. The Windows-side 4D newbies I talked to were uniformly impressed with its programming efficiency (you can create a nice-looking app with a modest amount of coding) and free-form relational-structure organization (you can modify structures and links on the fly in design mode, a rare feature in traditional Windows databases). These new developers also like the free, unlimited distribution of run-time versions of database applications, a real margin-enhancer for developers who sell a few hundred to a few thousand copies of a vertical-market application. The documentation must also come as a surprise to new developers; it’s the best I’ve seen for a database.
4D has a few other Windows-friendly touches. Intel-based systems, for example, have been living with dBase and its derivatives for over a decade, so both Mac and Windows 4D now support the venerable .DBF file format (it’s older than the Mac) for import and export. For that matter, import anil export have been reorganized, and importing ASCII files is much faster. 4D was an early friend of Oracle and other SQL giants, and Windows-side APIs for large-database connectivity are now part of the ACI US catalog as well.
Improved Performance
ACI US has significantly optimized 4D 3.5 for PowerPC performance (and is one of the few nongraphics companies to tackle 604-specific optimization). However, 4D is still not quite as fast as the current version of Blyth’s Omnis 7 at searching large data tables, and it’s nowhere near as fast as Microsoft FoxPro at the same task.
Nonetheless, for most user interactions the speed of the interface itself is a key factor, and here 3.5, even on a plain Power Macintosh 6100, is absolutely snappy compared with 3.0 on a good Quadra; just click, and pop — something happens. 4D’s highly evolved multitasking capabilities also mitigate the impact of its good-but-not-stellar search speed on productivity; in real life, searching and sorting giant flat files is a tiny fraction of day-to-day office database interaction.
Although 4D now covers the Power Mac and Windows platforms, it hasn’t sacrificed its original virtues. You can do 4D 3.5 development, amazingly enough, on a Mac SE with 2MB of RAM, suggesting that bloatware need not be the inevitable price of progress (although 4D takes up 8MB under Windows 95). It’s still easy to define and modify database structures and to design layouts for data entry and reports for output, and most aspects of the basic 4D scripting language have been stable for at least four years.
4D Compiler, another in the vast array of 4D-related products, not only provides security for database scripts but lets them run several orders of magnitude faster. ACI US seeks to minimize developer retraining by maintaining a core product that can be rewritten for new platforms and incorporating new features and new functions via its separate add-on products (4D Compiler, 4D Passport, and 4D Server). The evidence from the market shows that this approach keeps developers very happy indeed.
The Last Word
ACI US's 4D is the leading Mac relational database, and now you can use it for Windows development, too. It’s a good choice for mixed-platform, medium-scale client/server applications.
Seiter, Charles. (March 1996). 4th Dimension 3.5. Macworld. (pg. 60).
Laurent Ribardiere
Applications
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4D_3.5.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
