Australian DevCon Reports

by Warren Marshall and John Thorley

Published 1999-03-19    Printer-friendly version

Clarion Magazine is pleased to present two special reports on the recent Australian DevCon held in Sydney, NSW, Australia on March 13 and 14, 1999.

On a personal note, I'd like to particularly encourage US developers to make the trip down under for a conference. The exchange rate (of about AU$1.50 to US$1.00) means you can probably take a two week trip to Australia for not much more than a two week trip to Hawaii (and maybe less! - it doesn't take long to make back the difference in airfare). I had a terrific time on my tour down under, and a Clarion conference is a perfect excuse for the trip.

Dave Harms, Publisher

Aussie DevCon Report - John Thorley

Aussie DevCon Report - Warren Marshall

Aussie DevCon Report

By John Thorley

This year's Australian Clarion DevCon was the seventh of the 1990's, and was held in Sydney on the week end of 13 -14 March. Numbers were down a little on previous years but there was no shortage of international Topspeed and third party developer support.

Roy Rafalco, Antonio Rajan and Scott Ferrett from Topspeed and third party developers Andy Stapleton, Bruce Johnson, Pete Halsted, Cliff Court and George Willbanks all gave interesting presentations. As well as attending the conference, Andy and Bruce are presenting a number of well-supported training courses while in Australia.

The social highlight of the conference was a BBQ and Jazz Cruise on Sydney's fabulous harbor on the Saturday night. Rhys Daniels, conference organizer, is still claiming credit for the spectacular fireworks display put on for us by the locals.

Highlights

• This conference saw the official launch of Topspeed Consulting Australia. Rhys Daniell, CEO of the Aussie incarnation of Topspeed Consulting was quick to point out that his team of talented developers were keen to take on local and international projects. Rhys noted out that with the Australian dollar so low relative to the US dollar, it made good economic sense to consider outsourcing US development projects to the talented Aussie development team.
• Scott Ferrett advised that a candidate patch for Clarion for Windows release 5A was now available for download and if the patch performed to spec, an official, full CD release would be made available shortly.
• Roy Rafalco announce that the price of Clarion 5 Professional edition would increase on 1^st April 1999. Roy also indicated that Topspeed was encountering some corporate resistance to the Enterprise Edition because some corporates perceived the price as too low for them to consider using it for strategic development. Does this mean that we can also expect to see an increase in the price of the Enterprise Edition or perhaps the introduction of a Corporate Bundle? Roy wasn't saying!
• Roy also advised that Topspeed would be withdrawing its presence on CompuServe before the end of April.
• George Willbanks demonstrated a set of Training CD development tools based partly on Lotus ScreenCam and announced that Andy Stapleton had agreed to develop with George two CD-based training courses on generic SQL and SQL/Anywhere. Pricing and availability will be advised in due course.

The award for the best throw away line has to go to Pete Halsted. For those of you who have not met Pete, he's built like the proverbial brick outhouse. Pete had the last presentation before lunch and his presentation was late starting. He reassured us that he'd finish before lunch ... "Hell, I ain't ever been late for lunch!"

New Products

Capesoft (Bruce Johnson) released three new products

• Special Agent This product integrates a redistributable Microsoft Agent OCX together with templates to enable you to use a talking Teaching agent within your application. You can use the agent to run demos or provide training within your application. While perhaps not to everyone's liking, it's certainly worth a look if you want to impress your users. The DevCon price until the end of March is $AU219. Normal price will be about $AU329.
• Makeover This tool comes with 15 styles which you can apply to your application. This can give you features such as wallpaper textures, colored tabs on browses, additional cursors such as a hand instead of an arrow to select buttons. You can add to the style range using the tools provided. Until end of March Makeover is selling for $AU49. Usual price is about $AU79.
• Ticker Tape Control This control lets you place a moving sign control on your windows. Special introductory price is $AU9.

Our next Aussie DevCon will be in March 2000 in the Olympic city of Sydney. Why not start planning now to join us in 2000 for a Millenium DevCon to remember. The weather is great this time of year!

Aussie DevCon Report

By Warren Marshall

Aussie DevCon was held on March 13 and 14 at the remarkable Australian Technology Park at Eveleigh, a few minutes from the centre of Sydney. The venue deserves a line or two here. It houses dozens (hundreds?) of established and fledgling technology companies, as well as a conservatorium of music, in the revamped buildings of what used to be Sydney's huge railway maintenance facility. It's been implemented really well and, in my opinion, the conference success was due in part to this exceptional venue.

Compared with the last Australian conference, this one had a great deal more technical "meat", and also provided much more time for interaction between conference attendees. Lunches were buffet-style, which made it easier to move into and out of various conversations. On the point of attendees, the numbers were dramatically down on last year, possibly due to higher conference pricing. I guess it's a warning to would-be conference holders: if you up the price, you'd better commit resources to retaining that part of your clientele which is price-sensitive. Numbers were, I think, about 60, which is about half what I would have expected, given the outstanding line-up of international and Australian presenters.

Client Day

On the Friday before the conference, Clarion developers were invited to drag clients and would-be clients to see what Clarion had to offer them. They were introduced to Roy Rafalco (TopSpeed's CEO) and Antonio Rajan (TopSpeed's VP Sales), Rhys Daniell of the just-launched TopSpeed Consulting Australia, and Andrew McPherson of Radware, Australia's Topspeed distributor. Marketing demos showed them just how much more effective Clarion was than traditional tools.

Antonio built an Internet connect application from scratch in a couple of minutes and received the appropriate level of amazement from the guests. Juergen (Yogi) Loechner of Qikpay talked about how Clarion saved his marriage and allowed him to capture 60% of the Australian payroll market.

Rohan Dunstan of First Ecom, a large E-Commerce provider based in Adelaide, showed how Clarion Internet Connect applications can be housed at modest cost with First Ecom to reduce the initial financial burden on developers or users.

The numbers at the Client Day were disappointing but those who attended were pretty excited by what they saw. I'm sure we will see a lot of success from this type of format in the future.

The Conference

The first two conference presentations were by Roy Rafalco, CEO TopSpeed Corporation, and Antonio Rajan, VP Sales.

Apart from these two presentations which covered marketing, strategies for the future and the relationship between TopSpeed and its developer base, all the other sessions were technical.

As we have come to expect from previous visits by Antonio and Bruce Barrington (now TopSpeed's Chairman of the Board), Roy and Antonio are very easy to talk to and make excellent ambassadors for TopSpeed. Among the highlights of Antonio's presentation, which mainly centred around the power of Internet Connect and the future music of Wizatrons, was a casual comment that Clarion 6 would be entering beta in April. Antonio then looked at a completely astonished Roy Rafalco at the back of the hall, laughed and said "Gotcha!".

Antonio brought more laughs from the crowd when he tried to convince them that a 60-hour development would reduce to 2 hours with the use of Wizatrons.

Scott Ferrett (SuRF) of TopSpeed's development team in London gave a warts-and-all demonstration of Wizatron technology (not his area of expertise). It was interesting to see the difference between Wizatrons in their current beta and the picture Roy and Antonio paint - there is obviously a very long way to go yet.

Bruce Johnson of Capesoft (a South African company which produces some of Clarion's most useful accessories) explained the tricks and techniques that convert communication with hardware devices from a mysterious black art into a relatively simple process.

Cliff Court, Managing Director of TopSpeed South Africa, presented a remarkable tool which has just been released. Called Dev Monitor, it tracks and times every activity you undertake in the Clarion IDE and generates costing analysis for your development! As such it may well represent the most significant advance in project cost estimation since the development of computers. Of everything we saw at the conference, this product was one of the crowd-stunners.

On Saturday night, about 60 attendees and partners boarded a small ferry for a delightful harbour cruise around the Sydney foreshores. A band playing inside, plenty of room outside (especially while it rained briefly), an Aussie barbecue on deck, and drinks flowing freely made for a very special night.

I don't know how Rhys and Caroline Daniell organised it, but at 9:15pm Sydney Harbour was lit up with 15 minutes of spectacular fireworks. I assume we will get the same deal at Florida Devcon.

Andy Stapleton of Cowboy Computing Solutions started Day Two's proceedings. He went systematically through the benefits and pitfalls of SQL in Clarion and of specific SQLs. He made it plain that his favourite SQL under Clarion is Sybase SQL Anywhere due to its simplicity, elegance, scalability and the fact that Clarion Enterprise includes an unlimited distribution license. In stark contrast, Oracle was decried as about the most expensive, in hardware, software and administration costs.

As an aside, it was pointed out that Microsoft SQL and Oracle can not be backed up, except by means of a disk image, since they both use relative disk positioning to quickly locate records.

George Willbanks, president of the Philadelphia NE Clarion Users Group and a long-time Clarion user with a string of corporate presidencies to his name, explained why he regards Pervasive.SQL as the best thing since sliced bread. He went on to detail the steps necessary to implement Pervasive.SQL either on its own or in a hybrid database system with Btrieve.

George then previewed his newly patented CD-ROM based help system, based around Lotus ScreenCam and several other tools. The example he showed was a tutorial on creating a Basic to TopSpeed file conversion program. The technology looks very promising.

Then came Pete Halsted of NextAge Consulting. He showed us the code he used to tame the imaging OCXs which come with Windows. In addition to being enlightening about scanning and image storage, it also raised many issues regarding OCXs within Clarion, including issues of stability, memory leaks and complexity of the interface.

Michael Summons of Summons Technology provided an overview of object-based programming, arguing that this was the appropriate way to write code. This was followed by Jeff Ferguson of University of Western Sydney, who examined the object oriented Systems Analysis and Design paradigms.

Following on from these presentations, Rhys Daniell of Topspeed Consulting Australia presented a counter-view that object-oriented programming was in fact less productive that procedural programming.

Bruce Johnson countered that the issue was not "procedural or object-based" but "Legacy or ABC." About an hour of debate ensued, with no particular winner or loser. Surprisingly (it surprised TopSpeed's people too), on a show of hands, about half the attendees had in fact deployed ABC-based systems and used ABC templates for all their new development.

In amongst the formal proceedings, there were two show-and-tell sessions, where some excellent templates and tools were displayed, all discounted for attendees.

First came the overseas offerings: Bruce Johnson showed some of Capesoft's tools. Cowboy showed his SQL templates. Pete showed his imaging templates. Cliff Court showed his Mail and Fax templates.

Then a couple of Australian tools: Ray Creighton of Sable Software presented his App-Ref, a tool which automatically builds a huge amount of cross-reference information about one or several Clarion applications, allowing you to see unused fields, keys, files, common procedures across multiple apps, etc.

Geoff Bomford of Comformark showed his insanely cheap utility for automatically building complete Windows and HTML Help from your apps.

The conference ended with a short question/answer session with Roy. Not much new knowledge was divulged, but Roy did announce that within a few weeks, TopSpeed's presence on Compuserve would disappear. This would happen as soon as the upload/download infrastructure of GO TOPSPEED was duplicated on the Net.

The conference went extremely smoothly, largely due to the prodigious effort put in by Rhys Daniell.

Product and Service Suppliers at Aussie DevCon 1999:

Capesoft (File Manager, MakeOver, SecWin etc.) - www.capesoft.com
Comformark (Windows Help Builder Templates) - gbomford@acay.com.au
First Ecom (Internet Connect housing and E-Commerce) - www.first-ecom.hm
George Willbanks (Video Training) - www.tsres.com
NextAge Consulting (Imaging Templates) - www.thenextage.com
Radware (Australian TopSpeed distributor) - www.radware.com.au
Sable Software (App-Ref utility) - www.clarion.org.au/app-ref
Stealth Software (Mail and Fax Templates, Dev Monitor) -home.mweb.co.za/jo/joe-vn/index.htm
TopSpeed Consulting Australia (software development services) - www.topspeed.com.au

Other software is available through TopSpeed or its local distributors

Photos Copyright © 1999 Warren Marshall. All rights reserved. Duplication without permission is illegal.

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Clarion Magazine ISSN 1718-9942