Category Archives: Clarion 12

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.