Originally developed in 1983 and bundled with Informix-4GL as I-4GL Forms, I-4GL Menu's until 1996, are the cornerstone of MBD™ (Modifiability by Design™) concept, and provide a Rapid Application Development environment for industrial strength applications on Informix-4GL technology that will run against either Informix, DB2, or Oracle databases.
The FourGen CASE Tools suite contains a Form Painter, Screen Code Generator, Report Code Generator, Featurizer - for adding custom business logic, Menu System, and a front-end GUI (graphical user interface) Generator:
Form Painter
The FourGen Form Painter allows you to design and construct your complicated screens using a drawing board. It lets you define labels and fields both user defined and database table driven elements. This nifty tool allows you to define lookups to data fields on the form and create hooks to multiple screens via zooms. This tool uses user-friendly dialog box-oriented-interface that should make life of developers’ easier. Even complicated screens such as header-detail can be created with little effort. Types of screens include query, browse, add-on, zoom and extension, etc.
Screen Code Generator
The FourGen Screen Code Generator uses your forms as the source of information to produce source code with all the logic for robust user input programs. The Code Generator also provides hooks in the form of tags, which later can be used to modify or edit your code as and when required.
Featurizer
The FourGen Featurizer allows you to seamlessly integrate the generated code with the customized code that you write in simple instructions. The Featurizer keeps your generated logic intact thus making it easier to embed business logic via the hooks, dynamically without having to re-generate the form or the code.
Report Code Generator
FourGen Report Code Generator produces complete 4GL code for structured, diagrammed report generation. Generated code is completely commented and modifiable by design. The resulting Informix 4-GL report program is extremely flexible. When it is run, the use of program flags allows you to change how the report program is used. You can redirect the output to an email ID, a fax machine, a system file, screen, or to a printer. You can define an user input form to capture filters for “Ad hoc” selection of data set at the time of printing and produce the report output dynamically. All generated reports can be viewed
in a browser and sent via email.
FourGen Menus
FourGen Menus let you develop and create a menu’ing interface with a few keystrokes that offer better “look and feel” and program/system organization capabilities than any similar product. The GUI menu gives you a windows explorer like look and feel.
GUI (graphical user interface) Front-end Generator
The GUI generator can connect to your UNIX host and automatically create GUI front-end executables that will run on Windows® machines. Since, the Code Generator builds the code for both character and GUI at the back-end, no additional coding on the Windows® side is required. The users still have a choice between using GUI or character windows through the same front-end, iDesktop. This feature would enable a business to give GUI access to certain users and character based access to others.
