Foundation (also known as Foundation Shell) is a reusable application shell component for 4D. It provides menus, windows, toolbars, navigation, record display, find, sort, lists, preferences, localisation, logging, dialogs, passwords, sequence numbers, and a virtual structure layer. It gives a 4D developer a working application skeleton so they can build their own tables and forms on top of it.
Foundation was created by Dave Batton in 2003. It was stewarded by Walt Nelson / Nelson Consulting, Inc. from October 2008, including the Foundation 5 upgrade for 4D v11 with a team of community developers. Wayne Stewart has maintained it since the 4D v16 / 64-bit era, and it was assigned to him by deed on 11 September 2026 for release as open source under the MIT licence. Foundation 6 targets 4D 20 LTS.
Licence
Foundation is released under the MIT licence, copyright 2003–2008 Dave Batton, 2008–2026 Nelson Consulting, Inc. / Walt Nelson, and 2026 Wayne Stewart. See the licence and provenance for the full chain of title.
Source code
Public repository coming before 1 December 2026.