What is Clarion

I have included this on my other blog - "on-technology", but since i have decided to start seperate blog for Clarion - i think it is good idea to include this here too as my first post.

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 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.

So in nutshell...

Clarion is a data-centric Advanced Rapid Application Development (ARAD) tool featuring roundtrip code generation that preserves all of your own hand-written code while allowing you to re-generate your application as often as needed. It provides reusable metadata to quickly create "corporate quality" applications to manage business data. The code generator (AppGen) relies on "templates" to define the application; both UI and business logic. Clarion provides a comprehensive template set crafted by master programmers, hardened by years of use in the the real world. Any programmer can also create their own templates, in effect flawlessly cloning their expertise to all subsequent projects.The release of Clarion version 6 broadens the support for data access, and smoothly integrates additional support for XML, ADO and SQL. Clarion 6 adds new support for client-side Triggers, Business Rules collections, Report Generators that can output reports to PDF, HTML, XML and TEXT , native support for RichText, and the mapping of relational data to XML elements.
please visit http://www.softvelocity.com for more information - you will not regret you did