All posts by rzaunere

Clarion 12 – Upcoming release

Clarion 12, Clarion News, Clarion Win32, IDE, RTL,

Embracing the Future

We’re excited to announce the upcoming release of Clarion 12. While the release timeline has extended beyond our initial projections, we’ve used this additional development time to implement improvements that will benefit our entire developer community.

A significant improvement emerging from this extended development period involves our string handling architecture. While we had previously announced the introduction of a USTRING type to handle Unicode alongside the traditional STRING type for ANSI strings, we’ve arrived at a more elegant solution. Clarion 12 will feature a unified, enhanced string type that provides superior Unicode support while maintaining complete backwards compatibility. This streamlined approach not only simplifies development but also paves the way for an easier transition to 64-bit compilation in the future.

Beyond this architectural refinement, much of Clarion 12’s development has focused on building a solid foundation for future capabilities. We’ve made important internal improvements that, while not immediately visible, strengthen the platform’s core and prepare it for upcoming features.

Introducing AI-Powered Development

Clarion 12 marks our entry into AI-assisted development with a flexible, pragmatic approach. While our initial focus was on local LLM integration, we’ve built the system to accommodate any external LLM as we progress. During testing, we recognized that even machines well-suited for traditional software development might not handle local LLM processing efficiently. We’ve conducted extensive experiments with the LLaMA 3 series and various smaller models as local options, keeping the default choice flexible to accommodate different development environments.

This isn’t just another code completion tool – it’s a comprehensive coding assistant that truly understands (with your help) your application’s context and needs. For developers who prefer or require cloud-based solutions, we’ll also offer commercial AI integration options. This dual approach ensures everyone can access these powerful features, regardless of their local hardware capabilities.

Business AI: Today and Tomorrow

Clarion 12 introduces AI capabilities starting with practical IDE enhancements that streamline your development process. This is just the beginning of our AI journey. Just as websites became essential for business success in the 1990s, AI integration in business applications is becoming crucial for maintaining competitive advantage today. We’re laying the groundwork for you to capitalize on this opportunity.

Current IDE Intelligence

In this release, Clarion 12 includes AI tools to analyze your existing applications and suggest potential enhancements:

  • Comprehensive application scanning and analysis
  • Intelligent feature recommendations based on your specific business domain
  • Vector database creation for deep application understanding
  • AI-powered development assistance and code insights

Future Application AI

In upcoming releases, you’ll be able to integrate AI directly into your business applications:

  • Ready-to-use semantic search capabilities
  • Vector database integration with standard SQL databases
  • AI features that don’t require machine learning expertise
  • Templates and frameworks for easy AI integration into your applications

This phased approach ensures you can start benefiting from AI immediately in your development process while preparing for the next wave of AI-enhanced business applications.

System Requirements

For local AI features:

  • Minimum 16GB RAM
  • Modern CPU (12th gen Intel or AMD Ryzen 7000 series or newer recommended)
  • Windows 11 recommended (Windows 10 compatible but not officially supported for all AI features)

Standard Clarion development requirements remain unchanged for non-AI features

Looking Ahead

The release of Clarion 12 represents more than just an update – it’s a strategic step toward empowering our development community with next-generation capabilities. By focusing on practical AI implementation and maintaining our commitment to efficient business application development, we’re ensuring that Clarion developers are well-positioned to meet evolving market demands.

The release will be available before year-end, with updated documentation. We are also pushing hard to complete additional training resources, including videos and detailed blog posts, to help you make the most of these new capabilities. We’re exploring the possibility of featuring Clarion 12 on the ClarionLive channel. Stay tuned for specific release date announcements and early access opportunities.

Get Ready

We encourage all developers to begin planning their upgrade to Clarion 12. The improvements in this release, combined with the foundational work for future enhancements, make this a crucial upgrade for staying competitive in today’s rapidly evolving software development landscape.

CIDC News: Upcoming releases and announcements

AnyScreen, Clarion 11, Clarion 12, Clarion News

The Clarion conference in Orlando was filled with really good content and great speakers. This post is to report (summarize) some of the most relevant points I made in my presentation(s).

I started off with the most important news that the Clarion dev community is most interested in; the release schedule!

The image pretty much says it all, in short, we have an upcoming update for C11.1 which will be available in a couple of weeks. Related to the C11 update is the long awaited release of the AnyScreen resizer (the AS resizer needs a few changes that are included in the C11 update).

Here’s the projected timeline

I announced that we’re launching an open source project, the “Clarion Database Driver Kit”. This project provides the scaffolding and documentation for you to build your own fully Clarion-compliant driver.
Bruce J. of Capesoft already has a list of ideas that he intends to explore. I’ll post back when the project is available on GitHub.

Clarion 12 will release in December. I’ve talked and written a lot about the changes in C12, some are visual but most are internal. But something newly announced (and important) is the implementation of a pathway to making use of AI models (both local on-premises and cloud services). I put this screen up at the conference:

and this one:

No matter where you fall on the GenerativeAI spectrum, the use cases for database application developers are numerous. I’ll have to do a separate post to do justice to this topic.

Another important announcement was this:

We’ve started the process of putting the faithful TopSpeed C/C++ and Modula compilers into semi-retirement, and this image highlights some of the reasoning and benefits:

And just to be clear because I did get some questions on this topic, this change to the tech stack is for use internally in building the RTL and drivers, the [TopSpeed] Clarion compiler lives on!

Wrapping up this post, I made the point that there won’t be a Clarion 13. I’m not at all superstitious, but we’re still changing our version numbering to reflect the year of the release. So Clarion 2024 [64bit] is the release after C12, and it’ll be released by December 2024.

Clarion DevCon 2023

AnyScreen, Clarion 11, Clarion 12, Clarion News

We’re all looking forward to the upcoming Clarion developers conference, where we’ll be presenting the improvements in Clarion 12, along with some exciting brand new recently implemented features. The conference is your opportunity to learn and understand the latest new functionality in Clarion, from some of the brightest developers across the globe.

The Clarion International Developer Conference (CIDC) 2023 is being held on September 11th to September 15th (Sept 11-12 are 2 days of optional training), followed by 3 days of Conference presentations (Sept 13-15). It’s being hosted at the Wyndham Hotel, Disney Springs, Orlando, Florida, USA.

                                https://www.cidclive.com – Find out more and register to attend, or submit a request to be a presenter here

                   

CIDC 2022

Clarion 11, Clarion 12

The latest Clarion developer conference was hosted in Capetown, South Africa. From all accounts it was an excellent event! I was scheduled to do a remote presentation covering some of the future Clarion features. Unfortunately due to technical issues and scheduling problems I wasn’t able do the remote presentation. This post tries to capture and describe the key points of what was planned as a live remote presentation. I’ll be discussing this on ClarionLive on October 28th, 2022.

The key point is that the majority of new code in C12 is internal to the Runtime and the compiler, these are very important advances for the Clarion community.

The next area of development focus is on improvements for the End User Interface (the UI you present to your customers).

example of a few Listbox styles

Here we have a typical Listbox (with the arrow pointing to it), and the other three images are the same Listbox with additional standard Window Styles applied to them.

Setting additional Styles would be handled at runtime before the Window is displayed via a function call or a PROP call. We plan to have a global template where you set the Styles for any supported control by control-type, the Style settings cascade to a Procedure level template so that all affected control-types can share same style (with the ability to override at the Procedure level). Of course you can also use the function/PROP in hand-code or an appropriate Embed point.

These are the same Styles applied as they appear on Windows 11. I’m only showing the Listbox control, but every control supports standard styles beyond the styles applied by the Clarion runtime. It is a simple, yet impactful way for you to change the UI of your app and potentially enhance it.

Additional ‘Common’ controls:

As we work toward adding support for additional controls the plan is to release them incrementally after the GA release of C12.

Here’s a rough timeline/history of the Microsoft UI for Windows developers:

After a deep dive into the .Net world, Microsoft has seemingly circled back to updating the Win API. The Windows App SDK targets both C++ developers and .Net developers.

Desktop apps can be enhanced with mobile and cross platform solutions, but desktop apps continue on as a critical aspect for most businesses.

Clarion 11.1 updated and AnyScreen 2.0 released

Clarion 11, Clarion News

We have an update for Clarion 11.1 and a new version of AnyScreen (v2.0). This build fixes an elusive bug in the MS Sql driver, and well as other fixes. A new feature introduced in this build is a new Pragma “eol_is_space”, here’s an excerpt from the Help file that describes it:

PRAGMA (‘option(eol_is_space => on | off)’) W

If the pragma is ON, end-of-line characters inside a string literal are treated as whitespaces allowing string literals to be multi-line. This option is useful for embedding non-Clarion code, such as Javascript, HTML, and SQL scripts.

There are three requirements, (1) the last line of the assignment statement (the closing single quote) must be terminated with a semi-colon, and (2) you cannot have a WINDOW,REPORT,FILE or VIEW defined within the source code where the pragma is ON, (3) the embedded string literal has a maximum length of 64K.

Compiler Error: if the string literal is longer than 64K the compiler posts the error:
“Invalid string (misused <…> or {…}, or literal is too long)”

     example: 
V CSTRING(1024),AUTO

  CODE
  
  PRAGMA ('option(eol_is_space => on)')
  
  V = '
        <div ng-controller="ExampleController" class="expressions">
          Expression:
          <input type="text" ng-model="expr" size="80"/>
          <button ng-click="addExp(expr)">Evaluate</button>
          <ul>
           <li ng-repeat="expr in exprs track by $index">
             [ <a href="" ng-click="removeExp($index)">X</a> ]
             <code>{{expr}}</code> => <span ng-bind="$parent.$eval(expr)"></span>
            </li>
          </ul>
       </div>

       ';  !terminate with semi-colon
  PRAGMA ('option(eol_is_space => off)')

The use of this new pragma allows for some very useful functionality in AnyScreen 2.0. Essentially you can now embed blocks of HTML and Javascript using copy/paste with no restrictions on special characters used with the pragma block.

The install includes a new example that shows how to embed an HTML editor, Code editor, Video player, Google Maps, Signature capture and the Canvas object.

Load up the example app from Clarion\accessory\examples\AnyScreenDemo\AnyScreenDemo.app and you can see it in action. Here’s a screen shot:

You can review the complete list of changes for Clarion11.1 here

You can review the complete list of changes for AnyScreen 2.0 here

Clarion 11.1 and AnyScreen 1.2 are released today

Clarion 11, Clarion News

Latest update to Clarion is going out today, along with a major update for AnyScreen. There are some key features in the RTL for this release :

We back ported the event handling code from C12 into C11. The purpose is to avoid inter-thread SendMessage API calls. SendMessage can be dangerous in a multi-threaded environment because it isn’t thread-safe, and can result in deadlocks, but its needed for communication between threads.

We added a new public interface for working with Reports. When you implement the new IRpt interface the methods are automatically called by the RTL. You can read about it in the 11.1 Help file, just type “IRpt” into the index.

C11.1 has implemented much lower level support for AnyScreen. This has allowed for expanded functionality in AnyScreen, and faster performance.

Due to compiler changes, and renumbering of some property values, the 11.1 release requires all program components be rebuilt. If you use any 3rd party tools that ship blackbox binary files you’ll want to get the latest update for those tools.

You can read the complete list of changes/fixes and features here

AnyScreen has had a major update. Not only does it provide a large number of fixes, it implements a large number of community requests for added functionality. A lot of hard work went into this release, and a lot of deep testing from a great group of volunteers.

You can read the complete list of changes/fixes and features in AnyScreen here

Thanks to everyone who helped with testing this release!

New application security features in Clarion

Clarion 11, Clarion News, Clarion Win32

We’ve added two new linker options that can make your applications more secure from malware exploits; ASLR (Address space layout randomization) and DEP (Data Execution Prevention).

ASLR (Address space layout randomization)

ASLR also often referred to as DYNAMICBASE, modifies the header of an executable to indicate whether the application should be randomly rebased at load time by the OS.
ASLR is transparent to your application. With ASLR, the only difference is the OS will rebase the executable unconditionally, instead of doing it only when a base image conflict exists. ASLR is supported only on Windows Vista and later operating systems, it is ignored on older OS versions.

Why should you use ASLR? On platforms without ASLR support (versions of Windows prior to Windows Vista), there is a well know exploit approach for an attacker to find and manipulate code that exists within its modules (DLLs and EXEs) when the modules have been loaded at predictable locations in the address space of the process. Address space layout randomization (ASLR) randomizes the memory locations used by programs, making it much harder for an attacker to correctly guess the location of a given process, including the base of the executable and the positions of the stack, heap and libraries.

In the next build of C11, the “Dynamic Base Address” option is set on by default at the project level.

If you want to set it from the EXP file, the command is:

DYNAMIC_BASE
on any line by itself (outside of the Exports)

DEP (Data Execution Prevention)

The purpose of DEP is to prevent attackers from being able to execute data as if it were code. This stops an attack that tries to execute code from the stack, heap, and other non-code memory areas. DEP prevents malware from writing code into data pages then executing it.

In the next build of C11, the “Data Execution Protection” option is set on by default at the project level.

If you want to set it from the EXP file, the command is:

DEP
on any line by itself (outside of the Exports)

Summary

The combined use of DEP (Data Execution Prevention) and ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) have proven to be effective against the types of exploits that are in use today. DEP breaks exploitation techniques that attackers have traditionally relied upon, but DEP without ASLR is not sufficient to prevent arbitrary code execution in most cases. DEP is also needed to make ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) more effective.

Adding these two malware countermeasures to your applications is especially useful for applications that handle financial data, credit cards, health info, and more.

To set these linker options in Clarion at the Project level:

Open the Project properties page:

en

then click on the “Compiling” tab and set the checkboxes to ON

ASLR and DEP
ASLR and DEP