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.
