Monday, January 26, 2009

Clipper on life support ? [28th July 1996]

"Clipper on life support ?- Steve Silverwood's posting of CA's contemplating dropping CA-Clipper development..."

Hi to all Clipperheads,

Steve's posting seems alarming in the sense that CA has indicated on Compuserve that they may drop further Clipper development .

I am the developer of the KarenSoft range of Clipper vertical applications for a wide range of business applications. Visit http://www.cch.com.my/cch/cchss to see what you can actually develop using 5.2e.

As such, I use 5.2e to earn a living and I have not found anything that could not be done with it ! If there is a function that I require which is not available withing Clipper, I'll :

a) write one - beauty of Clippers' UDF concept b) buy a third part product (ok ! is you don't use 5.3) c) look at NANFOR.LIB d) pick up a freeware or shareware on Phil Barnett's OASIS FTP or from any of the fine Clippper WWW sites

What about Clipper for Windows ?

With cheap Pentium PCs with 16MB on board, we can no longer ignore Windows & Windows NT. As a professional software developer, I have looked at virtually all the Windows development tools available to the Clipper developer and have settled for FiveWin+5.2e. Unfortunately, I did not get a chance to use Clip4Win as I found what I wanted with FiveWin. BTW, I actually bought Clip4Win and I intend to look at it one day as there are Clipper developers that swear by it...

Trouble is 5.2e+FiveWin produces 16 bit apps... Currently, I don't see any problems but with the growing popularity of Windows NT, the market may begin to demand for 32 bit apps. With no 32bit Clipper, I don't see a 32bit FiveWin..

So what's the choices for 32 bit development tools ?

VO 2.0 - going to public beta soon... and Delphi 2.0 for 32 bits Windows is already available. No comments for VO 2.0 althought it appears to be promising on paper. I have looked at Delphi 2 and it looks very promising though it is pascal based. BTW there are a couple of 3rd party components like Appollo & Infopower that makes it clipper like. That's what the ZAC catalog say..

Conclusion :

Even if CA decides to stop developing Clipper, I'll continue using 5.2e for DOS apps as I have yet to use it to its fullest potential. Moreover, I believe that the numerous non-commercial WWW Clipper sites, including mine and especially Phil Barnett's OASIS will help to keep it alive. So long as there is demand for DOS based applications, Clipper will remain as the premier DOS development language.

As for Windows, I'll continue to use 5.2e+FiveWin for 16 bits Windows apps while I'll look at Delphi 2.0 for 32 bit development.

So is Clipper dead ?

Regards

Chee Chong Hwa

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Welcome to Clipper... Clipper... Clipper


In 1997, then using Delphi 3, I had already created 32-bits Windows applications for HRIS, ERP and CRM. In 2007, using Ruby on Rails, an AJAX powered CRM site running on Apache & MySQL was created and I am now using Visual Studio .Net 2008 to create web-based projects and Delphi 7 for Win32 applications using SQL2005 & DBFCDX.

So, why then am I reviving the Original Clipper... Clipper... Clipper via a Blog as CA-Clipper is a programming language for the DOS world ? Believe it or not, there are still some clients using my mission-critical CA-Clipper applications for DOS installed in the late 80's and up to the mid 90's. This is testimony to CA-Clipper's robustness as a language :-)

With the widespread introduction of Windows 7 64-bits as the standard O/S for new Windows based PCs & Notebooks, CA-Clipper EXE simply will not work and it has become imperative for Clipper programmers to migrate immediately to Harbour to build 32/64 bits EXEs

Since 28th January 2009, this blog has been read by 134,389 (10/3/11 - 39,277) unique visitors (of which 45,151 (10/3/11 - 13,929) are returning visitors) from 103 countries and 1,574 cities & towns in Europe (37; 764 cities), North America (3; 373 cities) , Central America & Caribeans (6; 13 cities), South America(10; 226 cities), Africa & Middle-East (12; 44 cities) , Asia-Pacific (21; 175 cities). So, obviously Clipper is Alive & Well : -)


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This is the original Welcome Page for Clipper... Clipper... Clipper, which I am republishing for historical and sentimental reasons. The only changes that I have made was to fix all the broken links. BTW, the counter from counter.digits.com is still working :-)

Welcome to Chee Chong Hwa's Malaysian WWW web site which is dedicated to Clipperheads throughout the world.

This site started out as a teeny-weeny section of Who the heck is Chee Chong Hwa ? and has graduated into a full blown web site of more than 140 pages (actually hundreds of A4 size pages) ! This is due to its growing popularity and tremendous encouragements from visiting Clipperheads from 100 countries worldwide, from North America, Central America, Caribbean, South America, Europe, Middle-East, Africa and Asia-Pacific. Thanx Clipperheads, you all made this happen !


What is Clipper ?

You may ask, what is this Clipper stuff ? Could Clipper be something to do with sailing as it is the name of a very fast sailing American ship in the 19th century ?

Well, Clipper or to be precise, CA-Clipper is the premier PC-Software development tool for DOS. It was first developed by Nantucket Corporation initially as a compiler for dBase3+ programs. Since then, CA-Clipper has evolved away from its x-base roots with the introduction of lexical scoping & pre-defined objects like TBrowse. As at today, the most stable version ofClipper is 5.2e while the latest version, 5.3a was introduced on 21 May 1996.

As at 11th November, 1996, an unofficial 5.3a fixes file was made available by Jo French. See the About CA-Clipper 5.3a section for more details. BTW, Jo French uploaded the revised 5.3a fixes file on 20th November, 1996.

Latest News

The latest news is that CA has finally released the long-awaited 5.3b patch on 21 May, 1997.

For 5.3b users, you must a take a look at Jo French's comments on unfixed bugs in 5.3b.

BTW, have you used Click ? If you're a serious Clipperprogrammer and need an excellent code formatter, Click is a natural choice. How to get it ? Simple, access Phil Barnett's site via my Cool Clipper Sites.

32-bits Clipper for Windows ?

Have you tried Xbase ++ ? Well, I have and compared to Delphi (my current Windows programming tool of choice), I'm still sticking to Delphi.

Anyway, you should visit the Alaska Home Page. Give it a chance and then draw your own conclusions !.

The Harbour Project

Is this the future of Xbase ? Take a look at at the Harbour Project

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