Andrew Barnham's Clarion2Java
Andrew Barnham is a busy guy. A couple of years ago he introduced his very impressive Clarion2Java project, which takes in Clarion source code and emits Java classes. Andrew has a vertical market app in production using this system. Clarion2Java is open source (LGPL) and is available on SourceForge.Â
Recently Andrew started working on another piece of the puzzle - an open source IDE for Clarion2Java. He reports that "the implementation is able to emit clarion source code from my project that is byte perfect match for clarions generator."
Not all aspects of the Clarion template language are yet implemented, however. Source code for the AppGen is available as well.
He's also reporting progress on integrating the the window editor into the Eclipse IDE, and has plans to create an application editor as well.Â
Andrew pointed out something that's always bugged me about Clarion 7 and up - the generation order of some embeds in CLW files is non-deterministic, meaning you get those embeds generated in different order at different times. There's no problem with that as far as compiling, but it is a real annoyance if you use source comparison tools or version control on your generated source. His solution was to tweak the template chain to enforce unique priority numbers at the relevant locations.
Now why didn't I think of that.Â