Whats New V4

[Paul Dennis]

Hello Graham,

Happy New Year. Any chance of letting us know what we can expect for V4. It would be useful to know for planning our forthcoming development.

Thanks
Paul

[Graham Langley]

Folks,

Happy New Year!

Here is what I can reveal about v4 at this time, beta testing is in March '16;

About Version 4 (Super Bolt)

• Lighting v4 will continue to use and enhance support for the jQuery UI and jQuery Mobile widget frameworks for Desktop and Mobile applications, with a view to supporting additional frameworks (e.g. AngularJS) for future releases if this proves to be a popular request.

• Compatible with 4D v13+ (support withdrawn for 4D v11/v12)

• Improved engine performance

• Reduced page refreshes and load times

• Developer Console - monitor callbacks, processing times and processing errors via the WUI

• 4D Array support

• New Tags

• Plug and play pain free upgrade from v3.0.3

• And more!

Here are some new tags to support Accordion and Dialog widgets;

ltg-accordion

Use of the Accordion widget in v4 can substantially reduce load times if your forms are field intensive as the content within Accordion Panels are loaded only when opened by the user.

This new Ajax feature reduced a page processing time with 1k fields from nearly 20 seconds to under 1 second. The ltg-tabs widget will also operate in this manner, see below;

The use of an additional attribute ajax="false" will revert to the v3 manner of processing the entire page at once, which is slower, but you may need to use this for DOM manipulation across widgets so it's application dependent.

<ltg-accordion id="accordion1" >
<ltg-accordion-panel title="Panel1">
content...
</ltg-accordion-panel>

<ltg-accordion-panel title="Panel2">
content...
</ltg-accordion-panel>
</ltg-accordion>

ltg-dialog

The Dialog widget;

<ltg-dialog id="dialog1" height="260" width="460" title="Dialog">
content...

<ltg-button onclick="ltgDialogClose('dialog1')" title="Close"/>
</ltg-dialog>

Example: A button which opens/displays the Dialog widget;

<ltg-button onclick="ltgDialogOpen('dialog1')" title="Open Dialog"/>

Show us your app's?

I like the idea of having a sub-forum on this group along the lines of “Show us your app's”, would anyone be willing to share their deployments for the good of the cause? A brief description and some screenshots would be fine. Who's up for that?

Looking forward to any feedback,

Graham

[Paul Dennis]

Thanks Graham,

Thanks for the update, all sounds very good so looking forward to giving it a try. J query mobile  is fine with me I prefer the current method where we have a desktop  and mobile versions separated rather than a single fully responsive wui. It seems to me that responsive websites particularly single page applications revert to the lowest common denominator and all we are seeing is larger and larger fonts in order to make things readable on phones but wasting a lot screen space on the desktop.

The development console sounds interesting

I am more than happy to share my application. what do you need?

Regards
Paul

[Graham Langley]

Paul (and anyone else willing to submit their application overviews)

Please create a new Topic on the Group formatted as follows;

"Case Study - <your application name>"

Include your Application overview and some relevant screenshots together with any relevant comments suggesting why Lightning was a good choice for the application and any positives/negatives at your discretion.

Thanks in advance!

Graham

[dros...@gmail.com]

Graham,

Please refresh my memory: I'm upgrading an old (and abandoned) v3 app to v4, in a 4D v15 app for Windows. I know that the forms were stored in the forms.xml file in v3, and each form has its own file in v4. I tried swapping the old component for the new, then following the instructions for a new v4 installation, then restarting 4D. I was able to successfully connect from a browser, enter the v4 license info, etc. Then I restarted the 4D app again. Lightning didn't generate the form files from the forms.xml file. Was it supposed to?

Thx,

David

[Graham Langley]

There was not an upgrade routine from V3 to V4, instead open the V3 app, goto the Forms section and copy and paste the form content into a .ltg file

in a text editor. Attached are the notes on new features;