Do you have a burning need to access your 4D data from a platform other than MacOS or Windows? Perhaps Linux, or a PDA, or a Web-enabled telephone?

You have one good solution under V6 now, and one more under V6.5, to provide this access:

- 4D's easy to implement web access will work with any platform supporting a web browser. Read the Web chapter in the language reference, and refer to Technical Note 98-12 if you aren't familiar with this. You'll find that if you stick to a few simple constraints, you can treat a web browser like just another 4D client in your code. 4D V6.5 will improve this same 4D client emulation, and will also support slightly lower-level and much more flexible "Non-context" connections.

- 4D V6.5 will come with 4D Internet Tools (formerly PDM Internet Tools), which can communicate with other applications using a wide range of Internet protocols. This plug-in also supports low-level TCP streams. TCP, in particular, offers considerable flexibility in communicating with software on a range of platforms. A little work is required for this solution, as it would be necessary to write support for some suitable protocol into both 4D and the other application. It would usually be worth implementing a standard open protocol to do this, such as an XML-based protocol. See https://www.w3c.org for more details on XML.