ClarionLive show notes for September 13 2013

Andrew Barnham presented JClarion, his Clarion-like development environment for Java, which runs as an Eclipse plug-in. 

Within the IDE each procedure in an app is stored as a separate text file, which makes for easier version control.

Why Java? Because Andrew is fluent in Java and prefers to use Linux. 

This allows Andrew to have more than one window editor open at once, so he can copy/paste between windows. 

The IDE supports incremental compilation, which greatly speeds up the development cycle.

Mike asked a few questions about the completeness of the implementation, and it appears that Andrew has been very thorough. You can also use at least some ActiveX components (when running your app on Windows) and there's the possibility of using OCXs also. 

There is a dictionary, but at present it's just a text file. 

License is currently LGPL but Andrew may release it under the Apache license.

There are still two things you need Clarion for - the templates and libsrc. 

Remote control is built in, so you can run the app centrally with multiple headless instances. 

Resource usage is significantly higher than Win32 because Java is resource hungry. But the cheapest off the shelf computer you are likely to buy is just fine. 

In terms of Android, Andrew is looking at some possibilities.

MDI is implemented.

UI performance is marginally slower, but because of the SQL optimizations (PostgreSQL is the only database currently supported) the app overall is much faster than the Win32 version of Andrew's app. 

If I'm a bit light on details, it's because I was so absorbed in the presentation that I neglected to make more notes. 

Yes, there are limitations, and Andrew figures he has about another 1000 hours of work (in addition to the 2000 invested) to create a polished product. But what Andrew has accomplished is nothing short of amazing, not least the very complex task of recreating Clarion's application generation.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/clarion2java/

Watch the recording at http://clarionlive.com/

Clarion Code Smell

This week's code smell: Lazy Class. If the class really isn't doing anything, or isn't doing much, maybe it's time to refactor it out of existence. 

The CIDC space on DevRoadmaps

I gave a demonstration of the /wiki/spaces/CIDC2013/overview on Devroadmaps. Access is limited to conference participants. But there's lots of cool stuff there!