C7 AppGen Released To Third Party Developers

Published 2008-10-21    Printer-friendly version

It's been a long, long wait. And for a small group of Clarion developers, at least, that wait is now over. SoftVelocity today released C7 with the Application Generator to third party vendors for compatibility testing.

Why hasn't AppGen gone out to all beta program participants? Releasing the AppGen to third party vendors ahead of time has two benefits. First, this testing may reveal problems that would prevent other Clarion developers who use third party products from compiling their apps; besides the possibility of bugs, the C7 compiler is stricter than the C6 compiler and some not-quite-legal-but-works-fine-in-C6 code may need to be tweaked. Second, getting the third party issues dealt with up front means less trouble later distinguishing C7 issues from third party issues. On the whole, letting the third party folks kick C7 around should shorten the overall beta period and make for a more productive beta period for C7 developers.

I should have a First Look up tomorrow (Wednesday) so I'll save most of my comments for that article. And really I haven't had a chance to do much except open a few apps and find my way around the new AppGen. I have managed to crash the IDE a few times, as have other developers, which isn't a big surprise. This is after all the first time anyone outside SV has played with this product, and we're bound to stress it in ways the SV developers never will. I do expect to see fairly quick progress on reported bugs, based on my experience with the initial IDE beta.

I've certainly been able to open an app, have it convert, use the window designer, add embed code (via embed points and the embeditor), compile and run, so I know the AppGen works, and does most (nearly all) of the things I need it to do. And it's fast. In one test I repeatedly added a new global variable to the School app, regenerated and recompiled. C6 took 17 seconds; C7 took just 10 seconds.

The AppGen overall looks familiar, if modernized. Some things have shifted place; some other things are slightly easier to get to. There's a whole lot that's new, including solutions containing multiple APPs (and PRJs), the color-coded embeditor, code folding, support for multiple versions of Clarion (which needs some work but looks promising; more on that in the First Look), a real source code editor, the file schema pad, the very cool alignment features in the window designer... well, I'll leave it at that for now. More cool stuff tomorrow.

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