Thoughts on CIDC 2013

When I mention John Hickey and Arnold Young I never know which order I should use for their names, because Arnold Young and John Hickey are a team. CIDC 2013 is their third hugely successful Clarion conference. While the 300+ attendee Clarion conferences belong to a bygone era, I don't think the quality of the material presented has ever been higher. 

There were some exceptional presentations, such as Geoff Robinson on code quality (complete with analysis tool), Brahn Partridge's intriguing approach to instrumenting applications, and Dries Driessen's extensive treatment of web services complete with code to generate WSDL files. 

While SoftVelocity didn't have any blockbuster announcements, they continued to show product improvement and they talked about and demonstrated a number of interesting new and upcoming features including a new windowing technique to fix MDI issues, a move toward a more component-oriented development style (partially related to the windowing changes), the beginnings of 64 bit support, better Unicode support, ways to bring more developers on board with classes, upgrading the IDE to .NET 4.x and more.

The .NET upgrades do not, however, seem to indicate any major new work being done on Clarion.NET. In fact Bob Z more or less admitted that going down the .NET path had been an error. And there was almost no interest in the room in .NET WinForms templates. 

Win32 Clarion development was still the main theme of the conference. But reflecting current trends in application development, Javascript/HTML ran a pretty close second. We saw a whole variety of web and mobile apps, and every one of them leveraged some kind of JavaScript tooling and most often a Clarion back end. 

SoftVelocity's H5 product is still in the early stages, and builds on the earlier Web Builder and Internet Connect products (which arguably had some features that were ahead of their time). If anything I thought Bob and Diego softpedalled H5, indicating that while you will be able to deploy full-blown apps with it you might also want to expose just some parts of your applications to the web. H5 makes use of the application broker, which means that each user running the app actually has a corresponding app instance running on the server. This limits scalability but does allow you to use an app as both a desktop and a web app (whereas most other Clarion options for web development mean writing new client code). 

A few other concepts that kept cropping up:

• Classes, classes, classes. I'm trying to think of any pure procedural code I saw during presentations. There might have been some, but pretty much every source example I saw was class code. 
• Layers and abstractions. Clarion developers build incredibly complex apps, and life is a lot easier when you can break an app up into manageable chunks. 
• Testing and test-driven development. This builds on the idea of breaking apps up into smaller pieces, and the technology (or technique?) of choice for doing that is, naturally, classes. 
• Source control and continuous integration. Use source control to keep a history of your changes and to manage multi-developer teams. Set up a build server. 

There's also a glaring need to bring some new developers into the Clarion community. Although there were a few younger folk in attendance, there were also a lot of gray heads. It was suggested to me by a few people that there are in fact more younger Clarion developers than either a look at the conference room or a scan of the newsgroups indicates. That's good news, if true. 

As always it was great to get together with other Clarion folk, renew friendships and learn a whole pile of good stuff. 

Kudos to Arnold and John (ably assisted by Bruce Johnson, who also conducted the pre-conference NetTalk training) for putting together another excellent event!