Description
Clarion is the foundation of the SoftVelocity product line and anchors the company’s reputation for fast, efficient database application development. In addition to the Clarion 4GL language, the Clarion product also includes both a C++ and Modula-2 compiler. All of the languages share a common optimizer, and they can be mixed within a single application.
Independent software developers and corporate developers have similar needs: to increase productivity to meet demands for new database applications. Clarion is a data-centric Rapid Application Development Environment (RADE) with an emphasis on code generation and reusable metadata to quickly create “corporate quality” applications to manage business data.
Through the use of code generation based on metadata Clarion helps developers ensure standards, reduce coding time, eliminate errors, and bring projects to completion in record time. It allows the entire development team to share and enforce a consistent set of coding standards. It also allows new developers to quickly and easily adopt the organization’s specific styles and continue work on inherited code without a lengthy learning curve.
Specialized Tools and Behaviors for Database Developers
The Clarion templates (as distinct from those you create yourself) focus on data-centric behaviors that might take months to code using other tools. Each template is configured through a design-time interface, so that to apply it to the current database schema, the developer chooses attributes and properties from lists. In other words, the developers don’t have to code to create complicated behaviors such as synchronizing a master – detail view of two data grids. These behaviors already exist in the metadata repository, and to implement them the developer sets the template properties.
Additionally, Clarion’s Application Wizard lays out a default application with forms that provide for browsing through lists of records, adds, deletes, or changes of records, and reporting. The developer task is to pick the tables, run a wizard, and then customize.
Your application can be generated at any time without overwriting any custom code the developer has added, and without losing the options previously chosen in the design time interface.
