DevRoadmaps is the successor to Clarion Magazine, which remains online as an article archive.
Recent Clarion blog entries
The CIDC 2017 schedule has been posted. Sessions include:
- A preview of Clarion 11
- Two H5 sessions
- A number of SQL topics including conversions, debugging, profiling, etc.
- A call to Code Craftsmanship
- Database backup, restore and integrity
- Template writing
- Home automation and Amazon Echo
- Google analytics in desktop apps
and much more, including third party presentations and of course two days of exceptional NetTalk training by CapeSoft.
Check out the full schedule here. If you haven't registered, this month is your last chance get a discount on registration fee.
CIDC 2017 is on! Register by March 31 and save $300 on the conference registration, or $550 on both the conference and the training.
Another good reason to register early - get your room at the Rosen! While there are other hotels nearby, there's nothing quite like staying on site.
See you in Florida!
I suppose it's always dangerous to say something's permanent, especially when talking about technology, but for the foreseeable future I've moved ClarionMag to this site, clarionmag.jira.com.
Why here?
For some years now I've used Atlassian's Confluence content management system to deliver Clarion Magazine. It's a terrific platform - I love it and recommend it to anyone looking for a powerful and easy to use CMS. But it comes at a price; at the number of subscribers ClarionMag has, a license isn't cheap. It's not an unreasonable cost, especially considering what I've paid over the years in my own development time creating the previous versions of Clarion Magazine. Only it become clear to me in recent years that Clarion Magazine was transitioning from a business to a hobby.
I've thought a lot about why this has happened, and what inside and outside forces have been at play. But perhaps the best explanation is this: it's been a good long run of 18 years, and it's just time.
Only I don't want to let Clarion Magazine go, really.
The best option I could come up with was to move it to a low cost hosted site, where all the software updates are included and I don't have to worry about any maintenance issues at all, not even server certificates.
There is, however, a different price to pay. This site is limited to no more than ten active users. That means that I've had to deactivate almost all subscriber accounts.
The bad news is you can no longer log in, leave comments, save favorites etc.
The good news is you no longer have to log in or pay any kind of subscription fee.
I do expect to post articles from time to time. I still have the urge to write, and I still use Clarion in the majority of my consulting work. But you'll probably see even less about traditional Clarion coding and more about where and how Clarion fits in the larger world of software development. What matters the most to me about Clarion these days isn't its past glories, or the nuances of the language, but how Clarion coding can be done using today's best practices, and perhaps most importantly how we can all preserve the value of our work for the future.
So thank you everyone for all your support over the years, not least in the form of subscriptions. It's been and still is a wonderful learning experience, for which I am always grateful. I hope you'll all continue to enjoy this latest incarnation of Clarion Magazine.
Dave Harms, Publisher
It's hard for me to imagine a Clarion developer who hasn't heard of Russ Eggen. A Clarion user for 30 years, he was both a consultant and an instructor for Topspeed Corporation. He was also a founding member of SoftVelocity when that company formed in 2000. He left SoftVelocity the following year to start his own company, RadFusion Inc.
Russ was a tireless Clarion advocate who helped many Clarion developers improve their skills. He taught numerous classes, wrote articles for Clarion publications, and was the author of the book Programming Objects in Clarion. His interests included flying, scuba, prog rock and on rare occasions politics.
I always enjoyed meeting Russ at DevCons, but that hadn't happened for a while. This year I was disheartened to hear that he was battling cancer. As his health deteriorated he had to stop working; a GoFundMe campaign started by Rick Smith raised over $23,000 to defray some of Russ's expenses. Russ's sister Julie was with him in his last days, and expressed gratitude to the Clarion community for their support.
Russ Eggen passed away December 24, 2016 at age 57.
In Part 1 Dave Harms introduced the idea of a feature toggle library, and wrote that the starting point for Clarion development should not be the data dictionary. In many cases the data dictionary comes at the very end of the process. But If the data dictionary doesn't come first, what does? There are a lot of different answers to that question, depending on what kind of application you're developing, the stage of development, and the scope of the requirement. In Part 2 Dave demonstrates his favorite way to design small- to medium-sized chunks of business logic.
Rick Smith has started a GoFundMe campaign to help raise $12,000 for a cancer treatment for Russ Eggen that isn't covered by Russ's health insurance. Read more about it and contribute here!
You probably don't need any incentive to give Russ a hand, but here are some anyway:
- For each qualifying donation Pratik Patel will provide a copy of his CYA IDE tool. CYA exports a TXA of your app every time you build, so it Covers Your App.
- Contribute $100 or more and get:
- A year's worth of ClarionMag for free
- Rick Martin's Format Assignment Alignment Addin
- Contribute $500 or more and get ClarionMag free for life!
- Contribute $299 or more and Mark Riffery will provide "The Interview" service to your or the business owner of your choice. This is a set of 40-50 tough questions about your business. You answer the questions, Mark answers. You'll gain critical insights and advice about growing your business, specific to your business and your situation.
- Contribute $250 or more get 16 hours of free consulting from Mike Gorman, via phone or GoToMeeting and you'll also get a five production user version of the Metabase System with one year of updates.
Update: The campaign has exceeded its target with $13,719 raised as of June 25!
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Other content
Today Johan van Zyl relayed a Node.js offer email in comp.lang.clarion. This is a promotional offer which is designed to get you signed up on a $29/month plan at Learnable.com. The first month is just $9 and you get the Node.js course and ebook. I haven't had any experience with Learnable yet, and it's probably well worth the $$$, but do note that you can cancel any time if you just want to drop the $9.
I've gone ahead and signed up for the $9 offer. I've done some work with Node.js but I'd definitely like to learn more. If you haven't played with it yet, I suggest you take a look. From the Nodejs.org web site:
Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.
There are lots of cool things you can do with Node.js - I've mainly experimented with it in conjunction with DocPad to create lightweight web sites.
Here's the offer text:
In just a few years, Node.js has become the go-to technology for building scalable apps for thousands of companies.
Today, save $120 on our epic Node.js Bundle!
Now just $9 - https://learnable.com/to/4JrBJloI
With this Node.js bundle, you'll learn to use JavaScript to build fast, scalable web apps.
You'll get...
COURSE: Node.js: An Introduction — Our brand new course will get you up to speed with the basics in no time.
EBOOK: Jump Start Node.js — Learn to develop a working Node.js application, from start to finish!
Learnable membership — One month's access to Learnable, including two (additional) free SitePoint book downloads. Membership renews at $29/month or cancel any time and keep all your downloads.
This very special early bird offer won't last, so be quick!
Demand for developers with Node.js skills is growing quickly. Stay ahead of the curve and SAVE $120 today!
https://learnable.com/to/4JrBJloI
Happy learning!
SitePoint
Check out these jQuery book recommendations.
Michael Dettmer has posted some information on the CodeCharge web development tool, which he points out has a lot of features that make it similar to Clarion and WinDev. Generated code can be in ASP.NET (C#), ASP, PHP, Java Servlets, JSP, ColdFusion or Perl.
Developers who use RAD tools like Clarion and WinDev do so because they believe those tools offer a very real advantage over traditional hand-coder development tools. But are those advantages as great as they seem? David Harms looks at when and why RAD is a help and a hindrance.
Our focus at DevRoadmaps is on two RAD tools, Clarion and WinDev. But there are lots of RAD tools out there, and we're always happy to learn more. After a question from a reader about CodeCharge, we've gone ahead and created a new page listing the available RAD tools. There are just a few entries - help us add more!
I've put up a couple of quick pages on Microsoft's Reactive Extensions (Rx) and Paul Betts' ReactiveUI, two libraries that are generating a lot of interest in the .NET world.
Mark Riffey brought Mighty Moose to my attention, which led me to a few other products that similarly compile your .NET code while you type, and run any affected unit tests so you get immediate feedback on how your changes affect your code base. This is pretty cool stuff.
Back in January there was a newsgroup discussion about whether WHERE IN or WHERE EXISTS is a better choice when using a subquery. And that brings up a few other questions, like the role of the cache in testing and the danger of using NOT in WHERE clauses.
While looking at ways to manage database changes that happen as a result of application upgrades, Dave Harms comes across SQL Server's snapshot capabilities. There are some issues to be aware of, but if you need to roll back a database change, snapshots can help you do it in a hurry.
DevRoadmaps contains a growing number of pages for MS SQL users. These include: a links page; notes on SQL Server 2012, SQL Server admin tools, how to /wiki/spaces/other/pages/429783, and the tuning advisor,
A couple of links to Monty Widenius arguing for MariaDB over MySQL and explaining when and where you need to license either of these SQL servers.
Lee White points out a recent blog post savaging MySQL for various flaws. The comments are also interesting reading.
Mark Riffey recently mentioned Telerik's Icenium, a cloud-based development tool for both iOS and Android development that leverages JavaScript and HTML5. There's a desktop IDE for Windows developers and a browser-based UI for other platforms. Your code lives in the cloud (Rackspace, reportedly). Apps are distributed through their respective app stores.
Icenium uses Telerik's Kendo UI, which lets you use one code base and create native user interfaces on multiple platforms. There's also something called LiveSync, which makes it possible to have multiple different test devices running and all syncing in real time to changes made via the development environment.
Lee White points out this blog post on creating your own network attached storage (NAS) box. Steve Streza (technology, design, and bacon lover) explains how he went about creating an 11 terabyte storage server based on the FreeNAS operating system (a variant of FreeBSD). The blog post contains detailed instructions and a parts list with a total cost of materials of just under $1500. The system uses six drives and can tolerate failure on up to two drives at a time.