Clarion 7

So you think that having no AppGen in Clarion 7 makes it unusable? Listen up because there is a way of getting AppGen to work even though we are only expecting it to be released in Phase 4 of the great Clarion 7 expedition.

• Step 1: Fire up Clarion 6 - yes, version 6.
• Step 2: Generate all your source using C6’s AppGen.
• Step 3: Go to File > Export Project File command, and export your newly generated source to a .PRJ file
• Step 4: Open that .PRJ file in Clarion 7
• Step 5: Build, pat yourself on the back, and then run.

And there you have AppGen for Clarion 7 in 5 easy steps. Another thing is that all of the new C7 code is contained in conditional compile statements, which makes that C6 app of yours virtually unchanged.

Aaah… the beauty of Clarion 7.

Is it just me or does this look really ugly? I know Clarion folk are not graphic designers, but first impressions do count. SV needs to go all Web 2.0 on that triangle’s ass - drop shadows, rounded edges (ok, maybe not for a triangle), fancy shading, decent colours. Oh ja, and the font. Typefaces are all the rage these days. It makes or breaks your Web 2.0 product I tell you.

One thing you can pick up from the splash screen is that the same IDE will run both Clarion 7 and Clarion.net. But we all knew that already hey?

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.

I picked up this domain around the same time the first alpha release of Clarion 7 was announced. Can you believe it!

Being extremely fond of the web (as well as Clarion ) I’m going to push to get this blog at the top of the SERP’s for the keyword Clarion 7. In the coming months, tons of Clarion folk are going to be wanting information about upgrading, release dates, etc, and that is where this blog comes in. So grab my feed - Clarion 7 RSS Feed - and stay tuned.

If you have any information regarding Clarion 7 and Clarion dot net which you would like to share, pop me an email - jason [at] jasonbagley dot com.