Clarion 7

Well I know Gary is! Although SoftVelocity are about 8 months behind their initial release date of the 2nd quarter of 2006, it is really great news that at least something resembling Clarion 7 has been pushed outside of SV’s repository.

From the initial announcement made on Friday, SV are going to be releasing Clarion 7 in 4 phases.

Phase 1 - currently at this phase

The first release of Clarion 7 to 3rd party developers who signed up for early access. These fine folk have also signed a NDA, so don’t expect to get too much info out of them. This is an Alpha version, and includes a couple of tweaks as to make it more Vista compatible.

Phase 2 - soon to start this phase

The new dictionary editor is planned for this phase. I find this pretty strange, as you would think that the dictionary editor would be one of the quicker and easier parts of the old IDE to port. This phase will only kick in once SV are happy with the feedback from Phase 1. Update: Unicode support has been implemented, as has support for clear type fonts.

Phase 3

This phase will see the introduction of the new Data Diagrammer. I’m guessing it is somewhat similar to Data Modeler, but I’m really not sure.

Phase 4

This is the big one. The App Gen. Once this beast has been released and is part of Clarion 7, thats where we will see the true potential of the new IDE come into being. Marketers call it your competitive advantage, and thats what the App Gen is to Clarion.

Obviously during these phases, individual IDE components will also be released, tested, broken, tweaked and finally fixed. As SV says, doing it this way will make testing and fixing bugs more manageable as well as shorten the development cycle. (Whatever shorten means.)

Clarion 7 - what can we compare it to?

Gary has compared Clarion 7 to the new Land Rover Discovery 3.

The old Defender was the best there was, but it lacked the fancy gadgets that the mass market wanted (airbags, ABS, HDC, etc), so it was largely overlooked. The new Discovery 3 is as good as the Defender off-road, but has all the bells and whistles on-road, so it’s attracting a whole new (bigger) market.

Me? I’m comparing Clarion 7 and the new IDE to Web 2.0. Web 1.0 harnessed everything we knew at the time about the web. It was ugly, slow, not very usable, but it got the job done. Then came Web 2.0 - and showed everyone what the web can do (think Google maps, AJAX, Youtube, etc) and you have Clarion 7.

Have you got any analogy’s on Clarion 7? Post a comment below and I’ll add it to this post.