I wonder why Xamarin is not mentioned or is that too much of a competitor?
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Now they have mentioned about React-Native, the little whatever resources they have right now will be directed towards that and we will end up again with something like H5 Template. It almost looked like they have very limited to boast about C11.
With the unicode support and the major RTL changes in C11, it might take several several versions for it to become stable. And since there are major RTL changes, I am not confident of compiling my existing C10 solution in C11 and roll out to customers.
While only SV knows for sure, my simple impression on the H5 templates is little use despite a significant investment of resources. Meanwhile, the SQL/ODBC issues discussed here on another thread remain for several years. With React-Native now apparently being Z’s favorite, one does wonder if it is a path with real SV market potential or just another hot fade side trip. I haven’t a clue about the answer, but am certainly interested to hear what others are willing to offer.
Douglas
My view on H5: Once again too little too late. With products like TSPlus and ThinNet, why do you need H5 to convert windows apps to web apps?
Personally, I would rather use NetTalk for new web apps than using H5. With Nettalk there is a good track record regarding releases, documentation, and support but if we look at Softvelocity’s track record, I would not like to depend on them to fix stuff, document stuff or support me with problems.
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Microsoft’s ReactXP uses one codebase for IOS, Android, WindowsPhone and Windows, so if they can come up with an app generator that uses that (for example) then that is the future of Clarion in a nutshell.
I agree with Z that mobile development has been a nightmare in choosing the right platform because there is something new every week. The problem with React Native is that there are still too many options with libraries, UI and plugin options etc to choose from, so choosing the right combination still won’t be easy.
Nativescript seems similar to ReactNative but with a more singular focus, ditto with Ionic which has very good documentation and support, but is a hybrid development tool rather than a “native” app generator. (ReactNative and Nativescript don’t actually generate “native” code, they generate js applications that are served to a native device via a bridge that can be a bottleneck to “native” performance)
I’m sure H5 has been a good learning experience for Diego, but the commercial opportunities for Clarion are much greater if they can come up with an app generator for all platforms.
To me the JSON generator he mentioned is just a sideshow for current Clarion developers, I personally can’t see a great need for it as an alternative to existing Clarion methods for handling JSON data.
Would probably be very useful if SoftVelocity did a few ClarionLive webinars and fleshed out a few details and got some feedback from anyone currently using these proposed technologies … but I doubt that would ever happen.
Thanks for the post. Hopefully a few more folks will offer their thoughts. Sure would be nice to hear more from SV and perhaps have opportunities for customer dialogue. One would think a quarterly appearance on ClarionLive could not be that stressful.
Microsoft did a pretty good job of explaining it here…
Thanks again. We can at least now eliminate Windows phone from the equation, but that still leaves plenty to consider.
Bob Z has a history of over-promising and under-delivering, so realistically speaking it wouldn’t make much difference what he presented at the CIDC, because most of it would never come to fruition anyway. When you’re a “team” of one (Diego) how can you be expected to work magic? SV needs to open source a lot of stuff, and just focus on the basics. But they won’t, because both Bob Z and Diego see it as letting go of their baby – Bob Z would rather take Clarion to the grave than make even a small part of it open.
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While the SV track record clearly shows delivery-on-promise problems, I’ve not heard much from Z in regard to open source. With “focus on basics” and open source having long been suggested as the way forward, I’d be interested to hear more ideas as to what in Clarion is basic and what should be open.
Templates I would think is the most obvious one, and doesn’t really require SV letting go of anything proprietary, because if you have a license for Clarion you already have the source.
Things like database drivers – or perhaps more importantly an SDK (which I believe may have been available in pre-SoftVelocity Clarion days) to allow people to create new database drivers. Clarion SHOULD have a native mySQL/MariaDB driver for example, but SV will never do it - they think ODBC is fine.
One could go on, but the reality is that SV will never let go of anything, so it’s really only an exercise in academia.
Sorry but … did he talk about a new release of Clarion.Net before the end of the year ?
He even talk about writing 64 bit applications with Clarion.Net, isn’t it ???
But … is Clarion.Net a dead project or not ???
Just wondering !
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IIRC, it’s been over 5 years since the last release of Clarion.Net. Apart from empty promises made at CIDCs, Bob Z stopped replying to posts in the Clarion.Net newsgroup years ago. And yet, SV have the hide to continue to sell the product. Very dodgy business practices.
Thank you dcash.
Hence the next question: what he was talking about in that presentation ?
If you believe Bob’s presentation, he’ll make the first new release of Clarion.Net for the last 5 years, within the next 2 weeks. Do you believe it?
In any event, it’s a half-arsed half-finished product, which without the level of template support of Clarion/32 isn’t of much use or interest to anyone. Microsoft give .Net compilers away for free. Why would you purchase a barely (if at all) supported one from SV, the only possible benefit of which is that you can hand code using the antiquated Clarion language? Without a proper set of shipping templates and a code generator on par with Clarion/32, it’ll never go anywhere.
My guess is that the Russians are no longer involved, and Diego simply doesn’t have the time to get up to speed and do something with it.
If anybody else has other opinions, let’s hear them!
Thank you for your opinion dcash. I agree with you.
But I’ve to say that there’s a sentence that Zaunere wrote on the Clarion blog that intrigue me a little bit:
We are supporting a new feature in the next release, during the compilation of the Clarion code we’ll generate C# code and project file (into a separate folder) that provides the exact same functionality as your Clarion code. That means for those who want to work with WPF or share code with a C# project, you can easily bring the code into VS.
Since my team has been asked to convert part of the code of our application (the calculation layer) to C#, I’m curious about this feature. For obvious reasons I’m very skeptical it can be useful, but who knows ?
When or whether it will eventuate is of course a big unknown, but it sounds like it may be a way for SV to save face to some small extent. It’s like they’re saying “We know Clarion.Net is next to useless as a development environment, but here’s something that can convert Clarion code to C# and allow you to use Visual Studio to carry on your project”.
What I don’t quite understand is that it would seem to encourage people to move permanently away from Clarion. I mean, who is going to write Clarion code, have it converted to C#, work on it in Visual Studio, and then go back to the beginning and write more Clarion code. I don’t get it. However, if you are trying to move away from Clarion, it might make life easier. We’ll see 