Clarion5 Professional Edition Rapid Application Development At Its Best! Douglas Smith
C5 takes a truly unique approach to application development. Let's start with a look at the interface. Notice that there are wizards available for just about all aspects of development, starting with the dictionary (which, by the way, is the key to any good application). The wizard will guide creation of a data dictionary, selecting the file type, i.e. Topspeed, DB3, DB4, etc., and defining how each field is to be set up in the dictionary. Then an application wizard asks a few questions about how the application is to act, and away we go. Within seconds, the whole application is defined and ready to compile and run. Literally create an application while your client is watching. The application generator, combined with reusable class libraries and templates, absorbs most of the workload needed to produce fast, consistent, easily maintained applications. This is achieved by inserting templates into the new application and specifying property overides. This then generates highly maintainable, structured code. Customize the way that this code gets generated simply by changing the way the template is written--allowing, sometimes, for really amazing results. The Clarion language itself can actually be customized with procedual code, object structures (OLE and OCX control) and OOP statements for even greater flexibility. One of the major application problems that businesses complain about is speed. Well, no problem here! Clarion applications have a very small footprint, allowing most to run even on those old legacy systems that some businesses still have around. In most cases the final executable file is under 2 megs--truly amazing. C5 uses a data-driven approach to development, allowing reuseability and consistency. Once the database has been defined, the definitions can be used over and over again. All GUI formatting is stored within the data structures.
