DevCon '99 Monday Overview

Posted September 28 1999

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Day one at the '99 DevCon has come and gone, and it's been interesting. As the promotional materials indicated, the focus really has been on the Internet (or more accurately, on web-enabling for the Internet and intranets. There have been some indications of TopSpeed's future direction on the necessary technologies, but pending Bob Zaunere's presentation Tuesday morning, that's pretty much all there is to go on.

Roy Rafalco gave a brief introduction to the conference and to some of the new people at TopSpeed. He also likened the challenges facing Clarion developers to a hurricane warning, an appropriate enough metaphor since DevCon is traditionally held during hurricane season in Florida. Roy also referred to recent news and some advice from the Gartner Group about a coming shift away from the Windows PC platform. According to the Gartner Group in particular, Windows software development targets are expected to drop from 60% to 40% in the near future. Java/CORBA development also outpaces COM development by a 2:1 margin. Indications are that while Microsoft dominates now, the field is about to open.

Roy Rafalco, Topspeed's president and CEO, started the conference off with a bang, or a series of bangs to be more precise. The chairs in the morning general session had helium balloons attached with strings, and inside some balloons were prize certificates. Watch the MPEG video (960k) to see what happened.

As Bruce Barrington said afterward, getting a group of Clarion developers to wait for a three count to pop balloons was like herding cats.

The keynote address was delivered by Hank Asher, founder of DataBase Technologies, a publicly traded company with a market capitalization of some $500 million that provides law enforcement database services. Hank's a big Clarion fan, and is behind eData, the company some of you may know for hiring Clarion's "best and brightest" to develop a new product. In the morning session, we all got a first-hand look at the result, as demonstrated by eData's Tom Moseley.

EData's product is a massive 20-30 terabyte database containing massive amounts of information on US businesses and individuals. The search engine is written in C and the client side product (which is pretty slick) is written in Clarion. Any user with the client software can locate data on, say, sales prospects, obtain the required results, and then request a report. A fee is charged, processed, and the report is made available for download.

Asher mentioned that Sun Microsystem's Scott McNealy had visited eData twice recently and was blown away by what eData had done.

Partway through the presentation a fire alarm sounded. The siren lasted only a short time, but Asher was forced to continue for several minutes amid a loud beep every five seconds and a strobe flashing behind the presentation screen.

Following the keynote address Greg Gubrud of ONTOP Systems presented his company's work with the Internet Connect product, outlining in particular the work done to create Java-free (aka caffeine-free) versions of their applications. The company has also created IC apps that use Java but local ISP and broker problems prevented him from demonstrating these live. He had better luck with the caffeine-free apps and a long-distance connection to his own ISP.

Clarion Magazine will have more on the Monday sessions later this week, including photos, MPEG video, and an expanded look at the keynote address.

So far at least the conference has focused heavily on the Internet/Intranet web application server area. Both Roy Rafalco and Hank Asher repeatedly talked about the opportunities in this area, and the need for a massive (worldwide) rewrite of applications. The title of Esli Badenhorst's general session was "Web Enable Now! Or Crash And Burn!" Whether that sentiment is quite correct remains to be seen, but certainly there is a major shift happening.

How TopSpeed expects to address that shift isn't completely clear yet, although there is a new release of Internet Connect in the works. Tuesday morning Bob Zaunere will present that future direction.

Monday wasn't all Internet though. A few of the highlights were Sebastian Talamoni's fast-paced, flashy, and informative Wizatron overview, Joe van Niekerk's look at new features in ABC and the Clarion language (you're going to like "interfaces"), and Tom Hebenstreit's session on building distributed applications using email. More on those and other sessions to come.

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