CHT (Clarion Handy Tools)
Templates, Classes, Utilities, Apps, Projects

JANUARY 8, 2020

Clarion 10/Clarion 11

User Stats + Version Comparison

CHT User Stats In 2019

As CHT developers start to migrate to the 2020 version of the CHT Toolkit, Build 24A.00.00, we're starting to see a larger proportion beginning to install the Clarion 11 version exclusively. Throughout much of 2019, the larger proportion of you continued to download and install our C10 version. We'd say that, statistically 80% (Clarion10) to 20% (Clarion11) despite our having both, equally viable, versions available to you as part of the same subscription price.

Early CHT User Stats In 2020

So far, since the Dec 22, 2019 release of Build 24A.00.00, that C10/C11 ratio has nearly reversed to 20% (Clarion10) to 80% (Clarion11) although only about 30% of you have migrated your toolkit to CHT Build 24A.00.00 at this early point in the year. We suspect, that in 2019 most Clarion developers continued their important Clarion developments in Clarion 10 while experimenting, with one or two toes in the water using Clarion 11.

Perhaps this ratio shift is just a reflection of Clarion developers saying to themselves, "okay, it's now 2020, and time to give Clarion 11 a closer look."

Very Little Difference

Which Clarion version you use, and which of our versions, is all the same to us - totally your preference. The Clarion 10 and Clarion 11 versions of our templates and classes are identical. Our Clarion-based utility apps for each version are compiled either in Clarion 10 or Clarion 11 as the case may be, while our template support DLL is also compiled in the related Clarion version, as the case may be. Our C# DLLs and C#-based Snap-In utility apps are identical in both CHT versions.

Furthermore, our Clarion 10 version will not be shelved or frozen in the forseeable future. Not until some time when a viable Clarion 12 makes it's appearance or in the unlikely event that Clarion 11 is evolved in such a way as to make identical templates and classes, shared between Clarion 10 and Clarion 11, untenable.

Most Evident Differences

Personally, we've discovered very little practical difference between the two versions, in the run-time functionality and in Clarion's libraries (Classes, DLLs, LIBS).

Primarily, the most evident differences between Clarion 10 and Clarion 11 are in the IDE, and in the appearance of Clarion 11's template user-interfaces. Clarion 11 template dialogs provide considerably greater display room than they do in Clarion 10.

That's a nice improvement. It gave us a chance in 2019 to re-evaluate and re-design our own template interfaces.

Up to the present time, we've adapted our template interfaces - our template dialogs - with template code changes and designs that display well in either product using identical template code. We're keeping our code and template dialog designs the same as we now enter 2020, just as we did throughout 2019.

While our C11 template interfaces can be further improved or, expanded at least, it would be counter-productive to write separate template interface code for C11 until some time that Clarion 10 is side-lined by most developers, since keeping two unnecessarily distinct products alive is not optimal use of CHT time.

Present CHT Clarion 10-Clarion 11 template dialog designs work effectively for us, and since we've not heard to the contrary from any of you, they do for CHT users as well. If you have complaints or suggestions, post them to our user forum or send us an email to the address provided below.

Real Concerns For SoftVelocity's Future

What concerns us most is that the widespread use of Clarion as a developer tool continues to be in a general, overall decline. We don't need to say, specifically how we know this to be true, because it doesn't take a rocket-science degree to see the signs.

A clear sign even came from Robert Zaunere, himself at the September 2019 CIDC conference where he announced a new, free, limited functionality "Community Edition" version of Clarion, austensibly, to entice, new, young Clarion acolytes into the fold.

If SV had the resources of a LARGE, well-funded player, maybe that idea might fly. But even then, there's questionable future value in giving potential new users a "taste of Clarion" with a feature-stripped pseudo-product that locks out the very 3rd party templates that currently help keep Clarion application development interesting, productive and, yes, even viable.

Clarion is a still a market-worthy product, but it needs investment, directional vision, creative endeavour and communication, things SV is clearly failing to provide.

Clarion needs MORE features such as those provided by the third-party community, not a feature-crippled version that no-one will give a second look because no-one except its present, dwindling, though consummately faithful, customer base will even know exists.

Some Suggestions From Us

Offer only a full ENTERPRISE EDITION to independent developers and formally site license this same product to corporate accounts on a per-seat basis.

Then offer to buy for resale, or license for resale, some of the major third party tool kits - or selected components thereof - as approved and co-branded Clarion addin kits. Offer these as paid-for extra levels or layers to enhance the ENTERPRISE EDITION.

Hire a knowledgeable, in-house technical manager to handle acquisitions of add-in kits from the third party community and enforce strict technical requirements, interoperability between kits and offer regional and even international training seminars.

Hire a knowledgeable, in-house marketing manager to handle user acquistion, sales outreach, educational-instutution licensing, sales shows, authorized sales agents and on-line sales and promotions.

Site license the PROFESSIONAL EDITION - renamed the CLARION EDUCATIONAL EDITION - to colleges and high schools for mid and entry level data programming courses.

Team up with an educational publisher with a planetary presence that attends educational conferences and visits colleges and high-schools in a sales and training capacity.

Get some major financial help now. Find some serious, well-heeled investors, or sell Clarion to a BIG player with deep pockets willing to make it into the product it deserves to be and could be.

Wasting Away In Margaritaville

Small, incestuous, naval-gazing, developer conferences are fine, but that's not marketing. It's just good-old-boy, slap-me-on-the-back and lie to me about what great new directions SV will take with Clarion. Then fail to deliver what's promised or miss the delivery deadline and ignore the well-meaning developers who ask questions about such things.

Those types of things may be team-building of a sort, but it clearly isn't working for you.

We'll talk more about these things in a later post on this January 2020 page.

JANUARY 1, 2020

CHT 2020 Build Released

Build 24A.00.00

 ** 24A.00.00 Highlights ** 
NEW FEATURES

LARGE_ADDRESS (Idea suggested by Didier Le Duc)

All 32 bit applications running on Windows are, by default, limited to 2GB of RAM. That's by no means optimal, especially for BIG apps or multi-threaded apps.

You can give your 32 bit Clarion 10/Clarion 11 and later apps access to 4GB of RAM, if your application is running under a 64 bit version of Windows.

We discovered, on implementing and testing this, that this feature really gives CHT Servers an extra speed and robustness boost. The speed improvement becomes especially clear when several send-threads are running simultaneously due to busy web traffic. Other apps that use a lot of threads, for example HNDCMP.APP and HNDSETUP.APP also appear to be faster, wherever multiple threads are involved.

The LARGE_ADDRESS statement is added to the application's EXP file by a new sub-dialog in CHT global template AACHTControlPanel.

To enable this setting, visit our global template AACHTControlPanel -> Config Tab -->Pragma Tab --> Use LARGE_ADDRESS Setting? = ON

FROM THE CLARION10/11 HELP FILE:

With this option set, the IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE flag is set to the PE header. If this flag is not set, the 32-bit application receives 2 GB virtual address space. With NT architecture, every 32 bit process runs in the 4GB virtual address space, but the amount of the virtual memory available for process data and code is dependent on Windows characteristics and settings in the process main executable's PE header.

WOW64 enables 32-bit applications to take advantage of the 64-bit kernel. Therefore, 32-bit applications can use a larger number of kernel handles and window handles. However, 32-bit applications may not be able to create as many threads under WOW64 as they can on x86. On some processors, there is less virtual address space available, and each thread contains a 64-bit stack (usually 512K). On the x64 processor, each 32-bit application receives 4 GB virtual address space in the WOW64 environment, if the application has the IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE flag set in the image header.

MORE NEW FEATURES

Before the end of Q1-2020, we'll introduce a "layered" price structure, in addition to our normal full-toolkit price structure. This layered-by-functionality design, will make it fairly simple for new and existing developers to choose and pay for only the layers they intend to use and to add-in extra layers as needed. Though we'll continue to encourage developers, to opt for the full toolkit option, by making that option the most cost effective, on a cost-per-template basis.

HEADS UP CLARION DEVELOPERS, WE HAVE A HAPPY "CHTMAS" + NEW YEAR + HOLIDAY + GIFT FOR YOU!!!! WE'VE LOWERED OUR PRICES, AND, WE'VE ELIMINATED THE 90-DAY SINCE EXPIRY, PRE-REQUIREMENT FOR ACCESS TO THE RENEWAL PRICE. AS LONG HAS WE HAVE YOU IN OUR DATA FILE AS HAVING BEEN A CHT CUSTOMER ANY TIME OVER THE LAST 24 YEARS, YOU STILL QUALIFY FOR THE RENEWAL PRICE. SEE OUR PRICE AND PURCHASE PAGE RIGHT NOW:
http://www.cwhandy.ca/purchase.html

We've now worked out exactly what combinations of templates will constitute the various layers. See the categories below:

CHT TEMPLATE CATEGORIES STATIC LAYERS

AACHT CONTROL PANEL (12)
APP HELP SUPPORT (16)
APP TXA SUPPORT (5)
BACKUP SUPPORT (3)
BROWSE SUPPORT GENERIC (10)
CALCULATOR SUPPORT (5)
CODE SIGNING SUPPORT (1)
CONFIG CLASS SUPPORT (2)
DATA VIEW SUPPORT (4)
DATES AND CALENDARS (8)
DISK FILES SUPPORT (32)
EMAIL SUPPORT (30)
EMBEDDING SUPPORT (15)
ENCRYPTION SUPPORT (4)
ERROR HANDLING SUPPORT (3)
HEX CONVERSION SUPPORT (1)
HYPERLINK SUPPORT (2)
MEMORY AND STRING SUPPORT (2)
MENU SUPPORT (1)
MS OFFICE SUPPORT (5)
NETWORK SUPPORT (2)
PROGRESS SUPPORT (1)
PROJECT BUILDER SUPPORT (20)
QUERY SUPPORT (20)
REGISTRY SUPPORT (2)
REPORT SUPPORT (3)
SHORT CUT SUPPORT (2)
SMS SUPPORT (3)
SOCKETS SUPPORT (1)
SOUND AND VIDEO SUPPORT (1)
SOURCE CODE SUPPORT (3)
SPELL CHECK SUPPORT (3)
SPLASH SCREEN SUPPORT (2)
THREAD SUPPORT (1)
UPDATE FORM SUPPORT (5)
VERSIONING SUPPORT (18)
WINDOW CONTROLS SUPPORT (30)
WINDOWS O/S SUPPORT (15)
TOTAL STATIC LAYER TEMPLATES (293)

CHT TEMPLATE CATEGORIES USER-SWITCHABLE LAYERS


BROWSE SUPPORT LBX* (15)
BROWSE SUPPORT HMB* (16)
BROWSE SUPPORT EXPB* (13)
BROWSE SUPPORT LORC* (4)
XML2HTML SUPPORT (2)
HTTP SERVER T234 SUPPORT (29)
HTTP SERVER T1 SUPPORT (21)
HTTP CLIENT SUPPORT (21)
ZIP SUPPORT (14)
INSTALLATION SUPPORT (4)
JUMPSTART* SUPPORT (85)
SNAPIN SUPPORT (21)
FTP CLIENT SUPPORT (17)
DEPRECATE CANDIDATE (17)
TOTAL USER-SWITCHABLE TEMPLATES (279)

LBX* - (L)ist(B)ox Browse E(X)tender = CHT-Only Browse
HMB* - (H)andy (M)arker (B)rowse = CHT+ABC Browse
EXPB* - (EXP)lorer(B)rowse = CHT+ABC Browse
LOCR* - (L)ocator (O)ver(R)ide (C)ontrol = CHT+ABC Browse
JumpStart* - Some overlap with other layers

 

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