Clarion is a Rapid Application Development tool (RAD) with a 4th Generation language.
The language was create by Bruce Barrington back in the early 1980 and operated
in DOS until Clarion for Windows came out in 1994. Clarion was first published by Clarion
Software but in 1992 Clarion Software and Topspeed merged. Topspeed developed
Clarion until 2000 when
SoftVelocity took over the development of the product.
Clarion is a database language and the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is
tightly integrated with databases. The IDE has a powerful Dictionary Editor where
tables are set up or imported from external sources such as ODBC or SQL databases.
Wizards can be used to create applications based on the information in the data
dictionary, or the developer can optionally create completely hand coded
source projects but the dictionary is only available to the application generator.
Clarion has a very powerful template driven code generator that pulls in information
from the data dictionary to generate appropriate code. Templates are used to
instruct the generator what code to generate. The templates are text based script
files that generate code in exactly the way that the developer wants it to be. The template
language is quite powerful and can in addition to internal statements call 32bit DLLs and
run EXE files. This allows template developers to pass information into DLLs or EXEs for
further processing or external generation of code.
Templates can be used to generate other languages than Clarion if wanted, but only Clarion
based templates come with the product. There are templates available to generate
ASP
and PHP.
In addition Softvelocity also sells a number
of add-on products for Clarion developers.
Clarion also has a thriving community of third party developers that provide a wide variety of tools.
Clarion 7 and Clarion.NET
In late February 2007 SoftVelocity started alpha testing their latest version, Clarion 7.
It has a brand new IDE based in parts on the
SharpDevelop IDE or #Develop.
#Develop is an open source IDE based on Microsoft's .NET technology. We at Icetips Creative
are of course member of the alpha team and we are very excited about the future of Clarion.
The new IDE presents a radical change in how we work in Clarion. This IDE will also
be used for Clarion.NET and, on top of that, it can also be used to maintain applications that
are still in older versions of Clarion, such as Clarion 5.5 or Clarion 5.0. With the 16bit
limitations of the old IDE gone, the development of those legacy projects,
that are perhaps not ready to be moved up to C7, will become much easier.
Clarion.NET should fit nicely into this new .NET based IDE. It will be very interesting to see
how existing Clarion applications integrate into the new .NET version. Currently (July 2007) Clarion.NET
has not been released. But you can rest assured that we will be there to create tools for .NET as we have for win32.
Icetips has been supplying high quality tools for Clarion developers
since September 2001 under the name Icetips Software.
In January 2007 we became Icetips Creative, Inc. and
we plan to be around for a long time to come to supply Clarion developers
with solid tools to use in their development.
©2007 Icetips Creative, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Home
Subscribe
Products
Resources
Support
Contact us
