Today, 1st May, is our Birthday!
And it’s hard to fathom, but CapeSoft is now 35 years old! Boy does the time fly. To celebrate we’re offering a special on all our Clarion Accessories.
For this weekend, and this weekend only (Friday 1 May through Monday 4 May) we’re offering a whopping 35% off list price.
When ordering add HAPPY BIRTHDAY to the comments, and Susanne will apply the discount before processing the order.
(Speaking of Susanne, she’ll only start processing orders on Monday. Her in South Africa Friday is a Holiday (CapeSoft Day?) so she’s having a well-earned rest.)
To be clear the special applies to all accessories, but not to any bundles (which are already discounted.) AND (this is confusing, I know) the Driver Kit’s are already discounted 35% since their release, so the special doesn’t apply to them either. But get them at the low price anyway, that price won’t last forever.
We haven’t done a special in years, and never one like this, so this is a one-time opportunity to catch up at discount prices. It’s also a good opportunity to get up to date if you need more licenses for new employees. Or perhaps wait until we turn 100 and get it all for free!
You’ll find the full list of products at https://capesoft.com/accessories/index.htm . From there each one has a link into ClarionShop.
CapeSoft Clarion Driver Kit
My last two years or so have been consumed by the new Clarion Drivers. These are genuine Clarion File drivers which get registered in the IDE, appear in your Dictionary and so on. Their reason for existence started out for two reasons; Connections to SQL databases could drop and the traditional drivers made use of Server-Side Cursors. Both of these issues cause us problems with our commercial programs.
Of course that was just the start. SQL engines have evolved enormously in the last 25 years, and so the new drivers are designed to be SQL-First. This means they have evolved supporting not just all of the existing FILE and VIEW commands but adding more (a LOT more) commands and properties as well. They allow unprecedented power at the program level improving performance and security while being backward compatible with all your existing code.
To date, 3 new SQL drivers are shipping and are “solid”. SQLite, MSSQL and PostgreSQL are all working nicely and getting regular tweaks. Next on the list is the MySQL/MariaDB driver. The PostgreSQL driver (and the upcoming MySQL, MariaDB and Firebird drivers) are “native access”, so don’t require (or use) ODBC.
I could write about the new drivers for ages, but I’ll contain myself and instead direct you to the Driver Kit page.
https://capesoft.com/accessories/filedriverkitsp.htm
The drivers are not cheap - but if you are making commercial applications for customers, and you are using SQL, then they are an essential step forward.
The entry level kit is $99 (down from $149) and contains the SQLite2 driver as well as the (SQL based) InMemory2 Driver.
https://www.clarionshop.com/checkout.cfm?pid=1706&q=1&
The SQL level kit is $990 (down from $1490) and contains the above two drivers, plus ALL the other SQL drivers as they are released. Currently this includes the MSSQL2 and PostgreSQL2 drivers, with more on the way.
Technically the MSSQL and PostgreSQL drivers are in alpha status because they are missing support for the Full-Text-Search command, but that will be out soon and they’ll move into “beta” status. All the drivers currently have quite a few active users so are ready for extensive testing.
NetTalk 14.38 Released
With the work on the drivers (which make NetTalk web Apps go faster) taking up a lot of time, the NetTalk release cadence has slowed down. But important work is still happening there, and just this week a new build has been released. This build updates the OpenSSL DLL’s and CAROOT.PEM files, so is an important update for NetTalk users.
https://capesoft.com/accessories/downloads
If you are still using an earlier NetTalk, this is an excellent time to upgrade (35% off!) and NetTalk 14 is completely stable and ready for use. For upgrades see
https://capesoft.com/accessories/netsp.htm#Cost
Online Tools
Most of our work these days sems to revolve around system integrations. Every time I wake up it seems there’s another API, another set of JSON or XML structures and so on. I’ve come to reply on three online (and FREE) tools we have to do a lot of the heavy lifting. So much so that I’ve book-marked the link
From here I can quickly go to https://capesoft.com/jFilesCode (which writes Clarion Structures and jFiles code for reading and writing JSON with no more than some sample JSON to work with.) https://capesoft.com/xFilesCode does the same, but for XML. And https://capesoft.com/curlcode is perhaps the most useful of all, converting API CURL examples into Clarion code.
If you’re doing work with API’s, then this is a resource not to be missed. (And did I mention, it’s free for all?)
Clarion 12
Just this week SoftVeocity published a new blog on Clarion 12. Apparently an update for this, with the long awaited USTRING is starting to ship.
All our (current) products work in Clarion 12.0, but I expect a new Installer will be necessary for the products that still come with Clarion DLL’s (of the 50+ products, that list is down to around 5.) The current installer will likely work for the rest.
Of course none of them have any USTRING support built-in yet. That will come though once we have it, and once it becomes apparent where it might be necessary.
So while we’ve covered a lot of ground in the last 35 years, there’s still a lot more to do. So join us in raising your class to the next 35!
Cheers
Bruce Johnson
CapeSoft (35.0.0 years old!)