OSCON: Wednesday review

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Posted Wednesday, July 23, 2008 by Dave Harms   

As expected it's been a busy day. The morning keynotes began at 8:45 a.m. and the last sessions closed down just after 6 p.m. Highlights for me today included Josh Berkus on securing PostgreSQL (lots of food for thought there) and Atlassian's proposed open source identify management API (which put me in mind of the recent ClarionMag articles on LDAP). I'll have an article up on the Atlassian project shortly; I'm still going over my PostgreSQL notes and I'll also have something to say about the keynotes, plus I have a few more pics of the conference.

Wednesday welcome

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Posted Wednesday, July 23, 2008 by Dave Harms   

In the conference center parkade this morning I spotted an old beater with a couple of stickers in the rear view window. One simply said "Linux", and the other said "Coding is not a crime."

Dude. I've seen code that was worthy of punishment.

It's just about time for the keynote addresses. Meanwhile I have a couple of tutorial reports from yesterday that need some cleaning up - hopefully I'll get a chance to post them before the day is out, but I have a pretty fully schedule alerady.

Ah, we're rolling now with a video parodying video game development.

"When you create sound effects, do they come out of your head?"

"No, they come out of my mouth."

Heh heh.

OSCON gets under way

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Posted Monday, July 21, 2008 by Dave Harms   

Australia aside, there's been a dearth of Clarion conferences lately. But that doesn't necessarily mean there aren't conferences out there that are of interest to Clarion developers. This week I'm at OSCON 2008 which is O'Reilly's annual open source conference held, as usual, at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon. Portland's something of a hotbed of open source development and attendance is usually around 2500-3000, which is a wee bit more than your typical Clarion conference.

But this is an open source conference, and Clarion is a closed source product. What exactly is ClarionMag doing here?

In my experience there are are plenty of Clarion developers already using open source products and tools. For the most part that means databases such as MySQL, Firebird, PostgreSQL and Ingres, and web tools, of which there are a great many (Apache and PHP are popular choices).

At OSCON I'm focusing on the database and web tracks. Today and Tuesday are tutorial sessions; the conference proper begins on Wednesday. This morning I took in Robert Treat's informative PostgreSQL session (more on that coming up in the mag); this afternoon is a tough choice between test-driven development and web site A/B testing. Tomorrow's schedule sports some web-related sessions including one on Javascript libraries (if you're doing web development and not yet using Javascript just wait a bit - you will).

So far the mainstream buzz at OSCON is all on the mobile side, where Linux-based operating systems are gaining market share. At the moment that doesn't have a lot of bearing on the work most Clarion developers do, so I'll leave that coverage to the big dogs. Meanwhile there's plenty of database- and web-related goodness to come.

ClarionMag is at OSCON 2008

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Posted Saturday, July 19, 2008 by Dave Harms   

Next week I'll be in Portland Oregon for OSCON 2008, O'Reilly's open source conference which typically draws around 2500 developers.

You may be wondering what I'm doing at an open source conference, given that Clarion is a closed source platform. In fact many Clarion developers use open source tools, particularly databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL and Firebird. Quite a few Clarion developers also use open source web tools such as PHP. And while open source isn't quite as common in the Windows world as it is among Linux users, it's gaining ground.

At OSCON I'll be paying particular attention to the database and web tracks but I'll be reporting on anything I think is of interest to ClarionMag readers. Stay tuned!

How to corrupt an APP

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Posted Wednesday, July 02, 2008 by Dave Harms   

Sometimes software can be in use for years before someone stumbles across a major bug. The other day Lee White needed to add an image resource to a C6 application, and to help pick out the file he needed from a directory with a lot of images he began the file name with --, as in --yada--.bmp.

The app saved and compiled fine, but the image file corrupted the project. Result: next time Lee opened the app he got a "Syntax error in project file" and the .APP file was unusable.

The problem won't happen if you have a single leading dash in the file name; you need two dashes. Lee suspects the parser is getting confused because two dashes are used to denote comments:

#compile "junk_BC0.CLW" -- GENERATED
#compile "JUNK_BC.CLW" -- GENERATED
#compile "junk.clw" -- GENERATED
#compile "junk001.clw" -- GENERATED

The solution is to hex edit the APP file, find the offending file name in the project data and change the -- to some other string. After that your app should be usable again. Just remember to make a backup copy before you do the hex edit.

More Aussie DevCon commentary

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Posted Thursday, June 05, 2008 by Dave Harms   

Russ Eggen passed along some comments from Aussie DevCon attendee Kim Davies, with Kim's permission to publish those comments in the mag:

Best one I've been to. The support from 3rd Party developers was astounding with prizes and gifts and discounts. The SV guys did a great job and really boosted the confidence of everyone attending with their demo's and training. Very enlightening.

The ability to use Clarion7 Win32 mixed with .Net and vice-versa was something to see. Not straight forward yet, but I assume, eventually it will be.

The issue now, will be for most 3rd Party Developers to reposition themselves in light of the .Net product. Even though Claion7 Win32/64 whatever, will continue to have a lifecycle of it's own, I belive the majority will eventually migrate to the .Net platform. And competition in the component world is steep.

I must admit, I felt that the appgen was pretty impressive, but they said most of the problems relate to the conversion process.

Kim's sentiments echo what I've been hearing from other attendees. Although AppGen wasn't made available there clearly were a lot of positives to the event.

As I've said before, .NET brings both challenges and opportunities for Clarion third party vendors. Yes, there's a lot of .NET code out there and some of that readily replaces existing third party products. On the other hand if you create a third party product for Clarion#, and it isn't tied to something that's uniquely Clarion (such as the template language or the file driver system), your potential market is suddenly not just Clarion developers but all .NET developers.

The day the data center exploded: lessons still being learned

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Posted Thursday, June 05, 2008 by Dave Harms   

As you probably know by now Clarion Magazine was affected by a major electrical explosion at ThePlanet's Houston H1 data center. Some 9000 servers (and close to 3/4 of a million web sites) were affected. Although 6000 of those servers were brought back online within a few days, Clarion Magazine's primary server is still down. Clarion Magazine has been running on the backup server since Sunday, although with delays in DNS propagation not everyone may have been able to access the new site that quickly.

Unfortunately, email has been a different story. In part that's due to what I see as a design flaw in the data center, and in part it's due to bad planning on my part.

When the electrical room blew it took out not only 9000 servers but also the DNS servers supporting all those machines. That I consider a design flaw - a complete failure of the data center should not also have taken down DNS. I keep my domain registrations with a separate company (I use both DirectNic and GoDaddy) so I wasn't completely reliant on ThePlanet and was able to get the backup server online via GoDaddy's DNS servers. After a few days ThePlanet got full DNS administration restored, so I've gone back to my usual DNS admin setup.

But email is trickier, mainly because of spammers. One of the ways to filter out spammers is to do a reverse lookup on the domain from which the email is coming. If the name and the IP address don't match up the mail gets dumped. ThePlanet, like other ISPs, lets me set up the reverse lookup so this doesn't happen.

Now on to my bad planning. When I set up this particular backup server last year I migrated the email settings, but I had one problem and I missed one task. The problem was that I somehow munged the clarionmagazine.com site (which I use for the mag's email) in Ensim and couldn't delete it (I don't actually use Ensim to admin the site, just to admin users and email). I didn't follow through and fix that problem. I also never set up the full DNS on the backup server.

So cut to early this week. I've moved the web site, and I'm waiting on news that my server is coming back online. Given the hassles with DNS changes it would be best if I could just get my original server back within a day or two. And the news out of Houston seemed positive, despite a major setback on Monday with a faulty backup generator. Still, just for some insurance I leased a third server (from a different company) on Tuesday; more on that another time, but safe to say it's taking longer than anticipated to bring that one online as well.

Now it's Thursday and I finally got through to a tech who admitted it could be another day or two before all the servers are back online. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and say he's probably being optimistic; I'm no longer holding my breath.

I did manage to fix the clarionmagazine.com Ensim problem on the backup server (no excuse for not persevering on this last year). And belatedly I requested the domains be added to the new server so I can administer DNS and get my reverse DNS lookup configured, but of course domain additions only happen once per day and I guess it'll be tomorrow before I can update the DNS for the new server. Meanwhile I'm using the DNS for the old server to point to the new box. That lets you send me email (once you get the DNS changes) and it lets me send you mail, but there's a decent chance your server will dump it because the reverse DNS lookup doesn't match. Hopefully that bit will be fixed by tomorrow.

The only thing I can't easily migrate right now is the ClarionMag news server (the NNTP application that is, not the physical server). My backup there is a bit outdated, and in any case my experience with moving the newsgroups from one machine to another is that the only way to do it and not mess up everyone's news readers is to shut down the news server, take a backup, and restore the backup to the new machine. So that task will have to wait until the primary server is back online (or else I'll have to start the newsgroups up from scratch).

It's been an adventure, and I'm grateful the consequences weren't worse. I expect to post a more complete article on my misadventures in disaster recovery in the near future. Meanwhile, thank you again for your patience.

Whiners vs conference attendees: And the winner is...

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Posted Wednesday, June 04, 2008 by Dave Harms   

It's been interesting to watch the discussions that have developed in the wake of the Aussie DevCon. It seems to be the case that anytime there's a beta release of C7/Clarion# or an announcement of some new feature there's a fresh round of cynicism about the time it's taking to get a gold release of either product (although most of the really violent sentiment seems to center on C7). The Aussie DevCon has been no exception: although AppGen was shown to attendees, there was no release nor was a firm date given for that release (although there was some hint that third party vendors would soon get AppGen for compatibility testing - time will tell).

To be fair to the complainers, some of that cynicism is justified. It really has taken a lot longer than anyone wanted or expected to get even the current AppGen-less beta. But the attitude of the critics who weren't at the Aussie DevCon is in stark contrast to that of the attendees, at least the ones I've heard from who came away with fresh interest in Clarion and hope for the future.

I think there are several reasons for this disparity. One is that SoftVelocity doesn't communicate that much with its customer base, and darkness fosters despair. The folks in Eden got a little more light last weekend than the rest of us have had for some time.

It's also possible that the attendees felt better about Clarion simply because they'd paid to come to a conference and they couldn't afford not to have a good feeling about things. This is along the lines of the idea that you enjoy a wine more if you know it's expensive. I'm not sure that's strictly true, however. I vividly remember the despair that set in at the 1999 Florida DevCon when it appeared that Clarion would be gutted in TopSpeed's rush to DotCom riches.

A slight variation on this theme is the idea that those going to the conference predisposed to feeling good about whatever SoftVelocity is doing.

Maybe.

Or maybe there really is some good news here. On the C7 front SV did, after all, actually demonstrate an AppGen (if somewhat carefully). And that's the last major piece of the C7 puzzle. The new AppGen is capable of converting C6 applications. Testing continues. Some apps convert correct, others require further bug fixes. It's all important progress.

As I said most (thought not all) of the whining and complaining is about C7, not Clarion#. I've even seen a post suggesting that it could take a year for third party support to line up behind a C7 gold release. All I can say to that is if your business plan depeneds on vendors who take that long to respond to major release of Clarion then you have way bigger problems than the C7 delay.

I strongly suspect that the upbeat attitude coming out of the Aussie DevConhas at least as much to do with the Clarion# sessions as it does with the C7 AppGen. It's a long, long time since Clarion programmers had much to be excited about in the way of new language features. The first Clarion for Windows release comes to mind: that opened up a whole new world. Certainly object-oriented support and the ABC class libraries were big changes as well, but in terms of how OOP and ABC impacted the kinds of applications Clarion developers can create I don't think they compare with the transformation of Clarion into Clarion#.

When Clarion 4 introduced OOP and ABC, Bruce Barrington said "Look, it isn't your daddy's Clarion anymore." To paraphrase BB, it isn't your grand-daddy's Clarion anymore. Yes, C7 is the vital next step, but C7 isn't the future. Clarion# is the future.

Aussie DevCon AppGen news #2

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Posted Saturday, May 31, 2008 by Dave Harms   

Some hot news off the Aussie DevCon press:

• Clarion# already has support for LINQ and .NET 3.5 - this was added two weeks ago but hasn't been documented yet.
• .NET templates are in development but have a ways to go.
• Of the .NET template sets the WinForms templates will be first, most likely followed by CF templates, then ASP.NET
• The .NET templates will not be a port of the ABC templates, but will follow the familiar browse/form paradigm.
• Clarion# will have the ability to declare variables inline in the code.

There's still a lot of stuff that's a bit unclear, such as the data access layer, although apparently there will eventually be many ways you can handle data access (actually there already are, but presumably this statement refers to the upcoming templates - more on that later I hope).

My thanks to Bruce Johnson and Kim Davies for the tips, and to Stu for keeping Rastus on a leash.

UPDATE: Stu Andrews has some DevCon pics up at ClarionFolk.com.

Aussie DevCon AppGen news #1

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Posted Monday, May 26, 2008 by Dave Harms   

The Aussie DevCon doesn't actually start until Friday, but the pre-conference training is in full swing and there's been a bit of news about C7. Kim Davies posted on CW-Talk2 that Bob showed the new AppGen in the first day of training. Kim called the new AppGen "kinda late Alpha" with lots of bugs and new features/fixes happening. "But what does work looks nice." Kim's assessment is that this is an evolution of the C6 AppGen rather than something revolutionary.

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