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Clarion?? What’s a Clarion? Aha! It’s a car stereo system, right? Well, I guess it can be, but the Clarion I am closest to is a fabulous 4GL
programming language. Programming, as in computers. Yeah, that’s what I do, I write computer software (as well as other computer related activities...).
This section of my web site is devoted to some stuff I think is of interest to Clarion programmers and others who might be curious... For more information,
visit the Clarion web site.
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Misc. Clarion stuff...
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Clarion vs. VB stories
These are stories and reports taken from the Clarion news groups over the past few years.
They are both fine languages. Clarion programmng requires a lot less work on the part of the
developer. The data centric design of Clarion makes validations and data entry a breeze. Generating reports in Clarion is also easier since VB can't print. (You have to use Crystal)
VB
programming is not RAD. Well it is sort of. It lets you drop objects on screens. Since VB6 wasn't oop, there was no inheritence and all possible events had to be coded at design time; rather than run
time. I write a lot of validation, editing code in VB.
VB.Net is great. Inheritence, run time introspection (my word) and defining events is great too. Allowing events to share the same code. Still
have to code lots for validation and editing. Still have to handle getting the DB to the form. Datasets are the best thing since sliced bread. Don't bother with datareaders.
VB.Net being built with
the Internet in mind is great. Getting data using XML and web services is great. Network problems are a killer.
In a nutshell, if you need to develop a client server db application, you will develop
it 10 times faster in Clarion.
If I need to use Internet technologies, use VB. Net and ASP.Net ================
By the way, I accepted 2 bids... 1 using VB, and the other a Clarion programmer. The Clarion programmer
completed the project in about 2 days, and it was perfect. The VB programmer took over a month, and its still buggy
================
I am in the thick of both environments, and while the .net languages are now very good, they still do not come
within miles of what Clarion does in terms of productivity. IMHO, all .net has significantly improved upon is the language. Their "templates" suck. The editor and ide is excellent, but the
combination of the improvement in the language and the ide/editor still do not elevate the productivity of programmers even close to that of Clarion. james ============
The issue here is that VB is no longer VB... For example if they use Visual Basic 6, and then
decide they want to move it to .NET that means that most of their VB code is no longer valid. Microsoft changed the entire language to coincide with .NET. The real question is "Do they really want to
become the 'pawns' of Microsoft?"
Also, with VB they would have to WRITE 99% of the code to make the application work. With Clarion, the application generator writes (in my experience
over the last 7 years using Clarion for Windows) about 95% of the code for you, leaving you with a lot less code to write. Another point for you to bring up is testing. Using the Clarion templates to write the
code, all of the code has been pre-tested by tens of thousands of developers. Everything someone would write in VB would have to be completely tested as there are no pre-tested VB procedures. Yes, there are
VB code generators, the last one I looked at was about $5000 a seat. ( I think I still might have a copy around here somewhere )
Clarion has been around since 1986 and as such, has been around longer
than nearly any other application development language on the PC. Most of the Borland languages (which were very good) are gone, with the notable exception of Delphi, dBase is dead, FoxPro is basically dead
(for all intents and purposes, I still believe Microsoft bought that product to kill it). Clipper is no more, although the "clipperheads" would like to have you think otherwise.
If they are
looking for stability in a language, Clarion is the best bet... As a matter of fact, if you had a Clarion DOS application built in 1989 you could still use most of the code (for hand coded source) almost
straight across as the language itself has remained very compatible across versions from 1989 to today.
In my experience seeing really is believing... Develop an application for them and show them
how fast it can be developed. Nothing fancy, and even better yet, if possible, use their own data. They'll get the picture. The bottom line is how much do they want to pay all of these VB programmers
(who are a dime a dozen) to produce something that will cost them about 3 times as much to develop as a Clarion application.
If you would like a more in-depth description as to how Clarion can
be effectively compared to Visual Basic, go to the web site of my friend, Ben Brady, at www.clariondeveloper.com and click on the "Why Clarion" link.
============
For the past 10 years or so, we as Clarion programmers have been irritated by the question
of,
"Yes, but how long is Clarion going to be around still? That's why I will go with Visual Basic."
Well, now we have the clear answer to this question with a real life scenario:
Microsoft has dropped VB support and the result is is that all those poor suckers who selected to go with VB have had to redevelop their code - to .Net. And believe me - the change is significant. So the
scenario that all the Clarion bashers warned us about (Clarion diappearing and having to redevelop in another environment) - has gone and happened to them themselves.
Now, gone is that argument from
the Clarion Basher's armory. In fact - we can use it now to bash OUR competition, since Clarion has also survived the Not-Com/IT bust 2000,2001 - something that a buncha others did not. =========
We developed a Key Management Program for Medeco High Security Locks that is sold across the vertical market.
They insisted that the development must be done in VB also, but after talking them into clarion, they don't regret it. In a conference call a couple of months ago, they addressed that out of all of the software
that has been developed for them, ours has been the most stable of all, (with 0 crashes) and 100 percent is Clarion code. =========
STORY 1...... Over the past year I have been involved in the Microsoft Visual Basic and SQL Certified
Training Courses (This involved 5 one week courses at a cost of $11,200 to my employer). Most of the training involving databases uses the pubs example SQL database that ships with MS/SQL. We spent hours
building pieces of the interface as part of the training experience. During the last course I mentioned to the instructor that I could build a working prototype application from the pubs database in about 30
minutes (including compile time) using Clarion 5.5 Beta2. He scoffed. So on lunch break (I had my laptop with me): Step 1: Use the dictionary synchronizer to create the Clarion Dictionary from the SQL
database Step 2: Use the Application wizard to create the application from the dictionary. Step 3: Compile and run the application. Elapsed time 23 minutes. Step 4: I won! I should have bet
him. Then I said.....would you like a matching web application? Result.. the next day I gave him my evaluation copy of Clarion 5. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
STORY 2..... My boss wanted a simple Clarion application for our Internal Telephone book ported to
SQL and wanted me to use Visual Basic to do it. After three days work I had the frame work only. No code except the Close form and exit the application. He asked how much longer it would
take. I said well there are 8 reports, seven update forms, and 12 browses..........About three weeks I said...but I'm just guessing. That unacceptable he said to which I replied...Your right, it
is!! That's why I wanted to use Clarion....it would have taken me but a few hours to convert the existing application. So he let me try it! Two hours, 30 minutes later the application was
running on the SQL server simply using the Topspeed ODBC driver to import the files, changing the driver in the dictionary, adding the full path and creating a global connect string for the SQL. I haven't used
Visual Basic to do anything productive since!!!!!
=====
I've had to work to overcome a strong anti-Clarion bias where I work, but I got left two critical
openings. We had two old applications that were not Y2K compliant. The hot-gun VB guy that they had hired quoted 6 months to replace them (completing the BETA for Dec 15th, 1999). I was asked if I could
"patch" the old Clarion DOS applications that were gonna check out on us, since being in beta 2 weeks before Y2K wasn't where my boss really wanted to be..
I got hit by a rush that I can
only describe as unloading an old WWII Hellcat in a vertical power-dive with the R-2800 sucking hard on the water-injectors and rolled a completed Clarion 5 ABC windows replacement out in 32 hours
flat.
Got my boss's attention.
At the next IS staff meeting, we were greated by word that a major application in Lotus Notes had just been identified as non-compliant for Y2K. Fliply, my boss
asked if I thought a week for building a replacement was enough. I had never even seen the software that was in trouble but casually said I thought that was adequate.
I delivered the replacement in 5
days.
I am fortunate in that I have a boss who wants to get work done and doesn't care too terribly much about the details. After I fixed those two problems, he kept an eye on what I was doing and
saw the volume of work flowing through my hands and started comparing my output to the VB programmer's. Jay lasted about a year past that drubbing I gave him up front and quit to work somewhere else; he
couldn't handle constantly being asked for actual software and being compared to how quickly I could throw together database solutions.
Me and my trusty Clarion RAD suite have become the
Department's firefighters. I control better than 1/2 the department in some fashion nowadays and often when there is data trouble somewhere, the question often asked is when can I
address it.
Some of it is unquestionably personal skill, but part of being skilled is knowing how to pick the proper tool for the job. Doing database development and maintainence on a LAN or desktop,
it is really hard to top Clarion for speed and agility in the hands of someone who understands and can exploit its strengths.
The lesson I learned was that it pays to watch carefully for weakpoints that
you can exploit with as violent a pace as you can sustain. It is the indirect approach to warfare. Hit the enemy where he is weak. And once you are through the initial defenses, move with as much speed and
force as you can muster so he can't contain your break-through. People have often been very startled at how fast a Clarion RAD suite can pour out running code. Use that. Speed is an allie. Get the enemy
off-balance with a blur of motion and he is easier to knock down and then completely out.
MMM. Guess I better stop before actual Testorone starts leaking out onto the web
:-)
Tim ============
www.base2.com EDI and
release management software We started the conversion to Windows using VB in 1996. When we discovered two-year old uncorrected bugs in the ODBC driver for Access which caused our software to GPF (and
spent 2 weeks trying to find out what WE did wrong), we dumped VB and three months of work. We have never regretted it..
==========
Thami,
I was using access (a little) and VB for about a year - Clarion is MUCH easier to learn and use.
In less then a week I had surpassed everything I had learned to do in VB.
The installation cd with its examples, tutorials, and manuals - and this most invaluable newsgroup are ALL you need to get
started in some fairly advanced Clarion programming.
Don't hesitate - Get Clarion.!!!!! Awesome product.!!!
Andy Morgan C5.5PE
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RAD Race
RADventure B.V the Dutch distributor for Softvelocity products has won the first prize in a
RADrace organized by the publishers of Database magazine and Software Release magazine in the Netherlands.
The race was held December 7 and 8, 2001, at the Advanced Development Center of Cap Gemini in
Utrecht , the Netherlands.
The jury consisted of well-known speakers and database authorities like Rick van der Lans, Ron Toledo, Peter Hinssen and Jan Detremmerie. The race was won using Clarion C55
Enterprise Edition patch E, and several templates and tools developed by RADventure.
The race assignment was complex and extensive. It consisted of building a complete system of drivers licence
registration, including fine registration (speeding tickets, drunk driving etc.) and a system for online access to data by Police, European citizens and Justice officials.
Strategy was very important.
The Clarion contestants Peter Rakke and Erik Pepping (both from RADventure) decided ealry on to go for a complete working system.
The other teams were from suppliers like Magic, Borland (Delphi 6
and J-builder) and Sybase.
Magic came in a distant second, disappinting the two young men that came in from Israel to participate. The Clarion application had 3 times the number of functions ready by
the end of the two day competition. The Magic team said 'we'll believe it when we see it'. So the Clarion team demonstrated their fininished application for all the participants, and impressed
the pants off them !
Amazingly enough, the complete assignment was almost ready and included a web based part, and all with only 300 lines of added code !!! (the rest, of course, generated by
templates).
The motto, as Erik Pepping said at the end of the race, was : If you have to 'code' at the RADrace, you've lost.
The RADventure Clarion development team took home an enormous
trofee, a bottle of champaigne, and this being Holland, a bouquet of flowers!
Once again it is proven that Clarion is out there , and among the best of them !
If you are able to read Dutch, or
just want to see the pictures see : http://www.array.nl/congressen/rr_main.htm
Erik Pepping Managing
Director RADventure B.V.
The Neterlands ===== The star-race-team of RADventure, Erik Pepping and Peter Rakke, has succeeded in winning the prestigious RADrace two years in a row, an
unprecedented event. They used Clarion 5.5 Enterprise Edition in combination with RADventure tools.
The RADrace is an yearly event where teams of developers compete to complete as much as possible
of a real life business case application within a very limited timeframe (2 businessdays). Part of the challenge is the inevitable change-of-mind of the customer requirements at a very late stage
<g> This years assignment was a European museum ticket and access program, with a.o. a lot of business rules, email and a web access interface part.
Competitors were: - Blue Polar using
Blue Polar - MagicHands (team A) using Magic (the product <g>) - Edcubed using TET - Avades using Visual Studio .Net - Borland using Delphi - Computer Associates using Advantage Gen -
Compuware using Uniface - Magic Hands (team B) using Magic Edveloper - Oracle using JDeveloper
For more information: http://radventure.e-bs.nl/english http://www.radrace.nl (Dutch, more info next week)
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Why Clarion?
I must say I'm always a bit puzzled by clients who use the
"clarion is unknown" argument. Given that the average joe has heard of VB - maybe even Dephi - Java at a real push, saying they don't know clarion is hardly significant. They also don't
know probably 95% of the tools available.
The one client who tried this on me made "elegant" ladies shoes. I retorted that I'd never heard of him, but I'd heard of Nike. (politely of
course). It was a analogy he understood completely because comparing him to Nike was patently ridiculous. That was the end of that discussion.
Some customers follow it through to "but where will I
find another Clarion developer"... The answer is - you might have to look harder, but they are out there. And given that clarion offers the programmer a "stucture" I'd venture that
it's a lot easier to take over someone else's clarion project, than it is to take over a VB, or C, or Java project.
For our commercial app we had one client who wanted the source code put
into escrow. "just in case". Now bear in mind he's spending maybe $1500 for the complete "off the shelf" system (hardware and software). We pointed out that the cost of the
_environment_ (Clarion, 3rd party tools etc) which would have to be placed in Escrow as well was about $10 000. ie he was paying 10 times the going rate (plus escrow fees), so as to protect his
$1500 investment. Jeesh. With business practices like this I'll be around long after he isn't. Lets say we had vanished 1 month after he'd got it all going. So what? So it runs for a year or
two. Then the best idea is to throw it away and buy some other commercial off-the-shelf competitor.
I even had 1 potential customer (a large insurance company) declare a product of ours was not
considered because basically they had budgeted $200 000 for the project. Our off-the-shelf solution was going to cost $1000. Ok, maybe it wouldn't have fitted their needs. But for $1000 why not just
buy the puppy and try? (They were spending 10 times that for each product they were "evaluating"....) Why am I not surprised that the company is no longer around?
But I digress - I'm
sure we all have a dozen stories along the same lines. I figure you can't make people smart - but there are enough smart people out there already. You just have to find them.....
========================
The technique I used was the following:
We use the TopSpeed suite of languages which include: C, C++,
PASCAL, Modula2 and Clarion. The normal questions which follow are: Q. Who are TopSpeed. A. They where founded by Neils Jensen (the founder of Borland) and originally consisted of a breakaway group of
Borland programmers.
Q. What is Modula2 and Clarion. A. Modula2 is Objected Orientated Pascal and Clarion is a proprietary Language for database work.
Then explain how they all shared the same
backend compiler technology, which allowed me to mix and match languages based on what was appropriate for the job (I wouldn't give %s).
and that was that, most of the time all they really heard was
c/c++, common backend and Borland association. ==========================
As you know, I've just finished a Clarion application that is being used by the IT standards industry
world-wide. It's 6600+ function points, runs on MS/SQL, has a robust backroom system, is supported by a web-interface, and a distributed client-side import-export system for updating the central
database.
This application was just audited by the heads of standards for such unknown companies as Sun, Oracle, IBM, and Unisys. The preliminary findings were that they could not believe how much
software was delivered for so little money and had so few errors. ====
I read an article years ago where the author mulled over the difference between technophiles and lay users. he
said (talking about the very early windows attempts at video I think)
"The typical users response is "Why is it so bad?". While the technophiles are amazed that it even works at
all!"
NetRefresh is like this. Programmers think it's way cool. Users are less excited because this is what they expected your program to do in the first place. The fact that up to now it
_doesn't_ do this has largely been either covered over, or they simply haven't noticed.
It does highlight a difference in approach though. Programmers are satisfied with a program as soon as the
program _works_. That is after all what we're being paid to do. Customers on the other hand _assume_ that it works. That doesn't excite them. After all that's what they paid for. The concept
that it "might not work" is bizarre to them. After all if you bought a car, and the dealer said "well this one has a few bugs, but will probably go most of the time" you'd look at him
strangely as well.
So the customer takes it for granted that it'll "work". All they're interested in are "what does it _look_ like?" and "How easy is it to learn
& use". Same as the car. The fact we can go places in it is a given. The real question we labour over is what color the car should be.
Thus when a programmer points out a feature that took 3
weeks of sweat to get right, Like a leave calculation that has to work juggling 100 rules, the customer yawns. However they swoon over the "cool wallpaper" that you fished out of our CD collection
at the last minute. Now you look at the customer funny....
I have a sneaky suspicion that this is why Clarion gets such rave reviews when put up against VB. Ok not all of it, but some of it. The point
is that with VB you go away, and get it _working_. It takes time. For most of that time there's nothing to see. It's all "under the skin" stuff. 6 months later the "programmers still
had nothing to show..." With Clarion the "visual" part comes out in a few minutes. So you have a prototype of the invoicing system at the customer in no time. "There are a few things
to finish" to you mention to them (meaning you haven't coded the business logic yet). But the customer sees a "working" app. Subconciously he assumes that it already "works". Ok
you're going to improve the look etc.
Drop in some 3rd party stuff and the entire framework of the app is done in less than a day or two. Emailing reports, Logins, Multi-User Access,
Context sensitive help, hyperlinkable email lists, and so on take just minutes to accomplish. And importantly these are all _visible_ to the customer. Wait a week, drop in Makeover, and he thinks you're
a miracle worker. This is real Progress !! My word but you're a fast programmer.... (Note the program still doesn't _work_ - he just hasn't discovered that yet. By the time he does hopefully you
have got it to work...
Then like a good clarion programmer you defer reports to the latest possible moment. Remember the client doesn't know the report is missing until he needs to print it. So with
the 2 or 3 "daily" reports, you buy weeks of programming time....
In my opinion it's a preferable cycle anyway. The customer gets good feedback early in the project. They can tweak a bit
here and there, start capturing data, discover a couple of "wouldn't it be neat if..." and generally feel like they're part of the project. In the end the project might go on for 6 months,
or much longer, but it never feels that long to the customer...
enough rambling....
Cheers Bruce =====
Check out www.softvelocity.com and see why using anything but Clarion is a waste time and
money.
Seriously, when I first found it I was a very productive Foxpro developer. A guy asked me to do a small job and I told him it would take approximately 40 hours to do in Foxpro, without any
reports. I had been a dBase / Foxbase / Foxpro programmer since 1978, and custom database structures prior to that in Basic and Z-80 Assembler so I really knew my way around the xBase languages. He asked me
if I could do it in Clarion, I asked why. He told me it would produce royalty-free executables. I told him I could do that with Clipper too. He told me to try Clarion and let him know what I thought. I sat
down at the machine and went through the tutorial (this was back in the DOS days of 1989) it took me about 20 minutes to go through the 'Getting Started' manual and when I was through, I sat back in
my chair and said "WOW"!.
I told him I would do the project in Clarion but he had to be aware that it would be my first project in the language so not to expect anything fancy. He said
"We'll see.".
I took it home, loaded it on my computer and went through some of the annotated examples to see how the language worked. I reminded me a lot of DataFlex, that I had used in a
project in 1984 (and I really liked it). So I finally started in on his requested project. I did the whole thing in 10 hours, WITH all of the reports that he wanted. I was really impressed by then. Then, I
had to write a benchmark program that would test the aggregate throughput of dumb terminals (Wyse 60's) coming through multi-port shared IRQ serial based controller cards. I decided that I would write
the whole thing in the "raw" Clarion language and not use any of the code generation tools, in order to get a good feel of the capabilities of the language. I would have normally written this sort
of thing in GW-Basic or in GW, with some assembler sub-routines. It took me a couple of days to write it using only 3GL language statements and that is when I truly fell in love with the
language.
Why? Because it's so damned easy to write, that you can actually come back 6 months later and understand what you did!
To date, I have found it to be the very best way to
create general business applications that require ongoing maintenance.
For example, Secure Address Book was completely generated by wizards with the exception of approximately 5 embed points, in which
I have maybe had to use 40 lines of custom coding. Everything else is accomplished through the use of specialized templates that provide functions that do not normally come out of the box. Don't get me
wrong, there is tremendous functionality right out of the box, however, to do some things you either have to write out the code (and test it) or buy a special template that someone else has already written
(or you can write your own template for specialized functionality if you want to be able to re-use the code in multiple applications) and tested.
To give you an example of how powerful it is, the main
browse procedure with all of the 'greenbar' effect, column sorting and locator functionality is one browse extension template in a package known as Handy Tools (by a company in Canada, www.cwhandy.ca) I did not have to use a single line of code to do any of that functionality. I simply dropped the template code on the window, set a couple of parameters
for coloring the 'greenbar', toggled a checkbox in the listbox formatter to turn on coloring and selected from a dropdown list, the various columns that would not be available for sorting.
That's it. The functionality to do the icon to the system tray, run once and some other minor functions was simply a couple of check boxes and entering the name of the icon file. The biggest section of
code that I actually had to write to do some functionality is 20 lines of code.
The whole automatic file maintenance and auto updating required only 1 line of code in one embed.
The password
routine for the login window required a total of 6 lines of code.
The registration process and demo capability requires 2 small global templates, you fill in 6 or 7 prompts and it's done.
So
you can see the tool is incredibly productive.
The 'Enterprise' edition comes with all kinds of database drivers and extra components for doing web based applications. The cost is about
$2500.00
Don't get me wrong, the product actually does have some warts, but far, far fewer than most of the Microsoft development tools.
Anyway, I have run on... Not sure how long this battery
is going to last so I had better sign off for now. Hopefully the power company can come out early tomorrow and fix the problem.
Have a great night! Ben Back to top
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