News
The latest from Rose Development — company news, project updates, and industry insights.
FoxSQL is a TCP/IP SQL bridge for AccountView and Visual FoxPro data. It lets C# applications talk in familiar database terms, while the actual FoxPro engine still does the work it was born to do. Nobody gets asked to parse DBF files by candlelight.
How a receipt scanner grew from a testable Swift package into a privacy-first iPhone, iPad and macOS platform with OCR, Core ML, CloudKit sync, exports, training tools, production audits and a hard-won understanding of what receipts actually do to software.
Hamlet is one of the most important developments in our current product roadmap: a native rich text, page layout, and database publishing editor built specifically for 4D. The goal is ambitious but clear: give 4D developers a serious document editor that can live inside a 4D form, work with real database data, and produce professional output for invoices, reports, letters, templates, and publishing workflows.
We have completed a major modernization of 4D Agenda, bringing a classic 4D plugin from its early-2000s roots into a clean, stable, modern macOS codebase. The original 4D Agenda codebase dates back to around 2003. It had served faithfully for many years, but it also carried the usual archaeological layers: old drawing paths, legacy platform branches, classic Mac assumptions, and enough historical compatibility code to make a museum curator nod approvingly.
Sometimes software maintenance is a clean, predictable job. And sometimes it is ten hours of staring into Visual FoxPro, legacy ActiveX controls, temporary DBF files, scrambled compiled code, hidden viewers, crashing PDF components, and one very stubborn transport management system that refuses to explain itself.
Building a high-speed document viewer for legacy FoxPro applications without asking the host application to modernize first.
Rose Development has a new site. Rather than write a generic announcement, we thought we would explain the technical decisions behind it — because the site itself is a working example of how we approach every project.
Kiewiet Rijwielverhuur on Ameland runs a bike rental, a luggage transport service, and a ferry booking desk from a single integrated 4D application. Here is how we built it — and why 4D was the right choice.
When connectivity is unreliable and drivers are under time pressure, your mobile app cannot afford to wait for a server response. Here is how we built Transporter — a rugged C# field operations app for Zebra devices that keeps working no matter what.
Every few years, the software industry discovers a new tool that promises to make programmers less necessary. In the 1980s it was 4GL and CASE tools. In the 1990s it was visual programming. In the 2000s it was offshore development. In the 2010s it was low-code and no-code platforms. Now, in the 2020s, it is AI code generation.
We are currently advancing the development of our DataBridge layer: a synchronisation engine that connects around 20 independent 4D installations to a central MySQL backend powering the website and related online services. The challenge is not simply moving data from A to B. The real challenge is doing it safely, repeatedly, and predictably in a live production environment where users are working, records are changing, connections can disappear, and no machine is allowed to become the source of chaos.
DataBridge was developed as a reusable synchronization platform for moving business data from a local administrative environment into remote systems such as HTTP services, Microsoft SQL Server, and MySQL. The project was not designed as a one-off export utility. It was built as a durable bridge between very different technical environments, with the flexibility to keep working even when the exact data shape is not known in advance.
