Hi,
for the last 3 years I am moving a large clarion legacy system to modern Blazor Server frontend and .Net backend on MSSQL database. While I cannot of course sell any of the new code base, not even part of it, since I am not the owner, I am still available for consultancy if you are planning to do the same or similar. Reach me please on linkedin if interested (check my profile here)
Thanks
What is the AI support for Blazor like Cikic, I imagine it would be reasonable?
I briefly looked at it a while ago and I’m not sure if it ever gained a following? Are there support groups around, like there are for Clarion?
I do not want to convince anyone to move from Clarion. My post is for those that think like me that Clarion is dying and that Blazor could be valid alternative since with one code base you can do web and desktop. I can help here with practical advises, thats all. As for the developer base and support I briefly asked search assistant to compare the two systems and this is what I got
I am in the process of moving 25 years of work to Blazor. I primarily use Claude. We have made a few agents to determine browse or form configuration, agents that can trace.function calls, and so on. It works quite well. However, in many cases it is better just to explain what you want, than how you made it in the past. The biggest issue is the non-deterministic nature of LLM. Unlike Clarion templates, you.can’t predict the result. Sometimes I think I would have been better of making wizards with Claude, and let them write the code
Super, at least I am not alone in moving Clarion to Blazor. I have solved frontend, backend, printing, label printing issues, things like splitting to client/server behaviour the standard Clarion behaviour. So in my case the complication is that I did not want to repeat the bad practice to have one project doing both backend and frontend. With Blazor this is in fact still possible. Instead I have a proper completely divided API that I can reuse in case for different frontend and even mobile. This was the biggest complication in my case.
Good luck for your conversion.
Thanks. I have had great use of Clarion during this process too. The thing is that every table is defined in norwegian, but the future developers are all non-norwegian. So I needed to translate every piece of code and file declaration to english. First thing I did was making a Clarion utility template that generates language files for each file. Here I translate every field (using Claude, actually). Then I run a separate utility template that generates a EF model in english, changing datatypes where required, (byte to boolean), specifiyng string length and such. Claude is instructed to look for attributes in norwegian, and usually manages to make a 1:1 map. This way I can maintain and add features to the Clarion app, without having to maintain the EF code specifically.
Interesting, I see your approach is different than ours. It seems as you want to continue doing Clarion and in parallel Blazor. We opted to completely remove Clarion once the conversion is done.