IN the Clarion world there are 2 universes and they dont mix and match.
For many ABC is a life saver and this also goes for Net Talk.
Both have decades of development behind them and are now very valuable.
They both depend for there very lives on the APP GEN.
For some reason the APP marches on although its not very plug and play.
One feels that for clarion to survive and thrive there are some future directions that really need to be discussed and not on the for ever time line.
The Template language while comprehensive is not plug and play and the IDE in the APPGEN pretty much closed. The language is clumsy and while you can do a lot of things the view in the app gen does not really allow for a plug and play extendable document and object orientated state diagram view.
When you call out of the APP GEN you cant pass an interface and access the internal structure of the APP GENs tree.
Clarion 11 has some very very powerful features that not really being exploited one feels.
Its ability to call functions as pointers changed the very nature of Clarion itself.
Maybe Clarion 11 should be what is used to allow developers to extend the App Gen by pass function pointers to clarion DLL’s.
The interface could give access to parameter queue arrays in the appgens tree and open it up to every clarion developer.
The problem is of course what is the APP GEN actually written in.
Is it CPP which means it can indeed be easily extended and supplemented by Clarion 11 which itself is not your grand dads Clarion 6. Its a fully-fledged function pointer supporting gun metal compiler.
I don’t understand exactly, what you means under AppGen. For me, Window and Report Designers, Dictionary Editor and source editor are NOT parts of the AppGen, though it invokes them.
AppGen trees and lists are based on VLB with quite sophisticated add-on over it to handle some peculiarities of these trees/lists, for example, possibility to have multiple nodes for the procedure in the main App Tree. The file with CW interfaces to the implementation of trees/lists in AppGen was prepared but not shipped. It would be useful to simplify implementation of complex VLB-based trees/lists in CW programs.
It would be the way to broke such dialogs as main App Tree or Embed Tree. Unlikely somebody from Clarion developers ready to write everything that such dialogs require from data sources. Just believe, these dialogs need in far more information than just strings to display.
AppGen is written in C++ and Clarion. The .Net part of interfaces allowing to use Clarion windows as user controls in .Net Forms is written in C++ and C#.
“AppGen is written in C++ and Clarion. The .Net part of interfaces allowing to use Clarion windows as user controls in .Net Forms is written in C++ and C#.”
Perhaps some of these techniques could be published to help the community develop its knowledge base without having to search the universe.
We all live in a busy world and the easier it is to learn the more a product thrives.
One assumes these are PInvokes or Managed calls to CPP.
We moved back to Clarion code after 10 years with CSharp after the hell of loader locks.
Unlikely this is possible. I guess, the number of different entities in the AppGen code can be estimated as 100+. Every entity is at least one class implementing some interface(s). It would be need to describe in details how all these entities (=>classes) depend on each other and how they communicate. In my opinion, it would be more easy to make AppGen sources public. But SV is unlikely to go for it.