Random Thoughts #3

Published 2008-09-25    Printer-friendly version

This week Clarion Magazine is having its annual fall subscription sale (save some bux, go to the home page for details), and that's put me in a reflective mood. This time I'm mulling over the future of Clarion development.

Oh, not C7 and Clarion#, per se. We all know that's coming.

I'm thinking operating systems. Specifically, Vista 64.

I know, Vista is the OS everyone loves to hate. Except, it seems, when it's 64 bit Vista. Maybe it's the 128 GB maximum addressable memory. Maybe it's better stability thanks to the 16 bit subsystem finally getting turfed (and incidentally, every time I try to type "16 bit" my fingers say "15 bit" - it just happened twice in this sentence - which I suppose means my subconscious is trying to tell me something).

Whatever the reason, I'm hearing more and more about Clarion developers going to 64 bit Vista. Why are they doing it? Because of VMWare.

As Mark Riffey explains, VMWare is a great solution to two problems. One will be with us for a long time, and that's the need (at least for some of us) to test applications against various versions of Windows. With VMWare you can install as many different Windows versions as you like. Each Windows OS runs in its own virtual machine, in its own window, making it trivial to keep as many different test beds as you need without shelling out for a whole lot of extra hardware.

The other problem, which I trust is about to go away, is that the old (the very old) Clarion IDE is a 15^H^H 16 bit app. And you can't run 16 bit apps natively on Vista 64 (that's a good thing). But you can run C6 and its predecessors on 32 bit Windows, so all you need is a virtual machine and, say, an XP install disk. As well, with the old IDE contained in its own virtual machine you no longer have to deal with focus issues when switching between apps.

Now, not everyone needs to test apps against older operating systems, and not everyone wants the (minimal) hassle of running Clarion in a virtual machine. That's still holding back some folks from making the switch. But once AppGen ships with C7 (and I think that day is getting pretty close) I believe we'll witness a sea change, with a great many Clarion developers switching to Vista 64. And some of those developers, once they get to Vista 64, will see the light and get VMWare anyway for compatibility testing.

Vista 64, gobs of memory, a fast multi-core mobo, C7/Clarion# and VMWare all make for a sweet development environment.

No doubt someone will point out the benefits of making developers use minimal hardware, thus encouraging them to optimize their code. That's how the old London Development Centre worked, and the idea has merit.

Just not a lot of merit.

There are lots of ways to design for and test against minimal hardware, memory-constrained virtual machines being one, virtual machines on crappy hardware being another. Just don't restrict your development that way.

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