DevCon Details: Richard Chapman On TopSpeed's Future Plans

by Dave Harms

Published 1999-10-14    Printer-friendly version

Wednesday afternoon Richard Chapman (RKC) gave a presentation on Topspeed's future directions, including the forthcoming Web Edition 2 and the iBuild product, and touched briefly on TopSpeed's Java direction. He also provided some information on the members of the London development center.

As in Bob Zaunere's presentation, a bunch of Team TopSpeed guys at the back of the room punctuated the speaker's introduction by doing "the wave."

RKC promised to be very vague about product release dates. Right now the London team is working on the Web Edition 2 (WE2) upgrade and iBuild@TopSpeed, two closely-related products.

The Internet Connect 2 technology which is in WE2 cannot be used with C5B or any earlier version - you only get it with WE2. WE2 will also have some IDE enhancements, mainly involving Wizatrons (which have been enhanced for the iBuild technology). There is also a property inspector for the IDE (think of the Wizatron property inspector). RKC stressed that the upcoming WE2 beta will contain a lot of stable, proven code: the HTML generation area is new but the rest of the system had to maintain a lot of compatibility with C5B. London expects that the beta will be useful for everyday work. The message was buy the C5 WE upgrade today and get access to the beta.

iBuild is the other major focus at the moment. There are some major differences between iBuild and WE2, such as the timing of HTML generation. WE2 generates HTML pretty much the way WE does (at runtime). This provides the greatest flexibility for rearranging controls and so forth at runtime but the downside is increased server load and more complexity in controlling the application's appearance (although performance has been improved in WE2). In most cases the controls on the screen don't change; only the data displayed by those controls changes. In iBuild the HTML is created when the application is generated rather than at runtime, and just the values of the use variables are changed at runtime.

Generating HTML sooner in the cycle gives the web designer a chance to work with the page contents without having to compile the program.

TopSpeed is also working on the three AppKits planned for iBuild. The creation of these AppKits by the Development Centre involves adding ABC support where needed (i.e. Winsock, email, invoice generation, audit trails), creating templates, and adding wizatron support. Finally a wizatron style folio is created for the AppKit.

One other difference between the products is iBuild has a 32 bit IDE, and WE2 has the 16 bit IDE.

Clarion 6 Web Edition And Java

RKC pointed out that Clarion 6 Web Edition is Clarion 6; only one product is planned. His advice for current C5 user is to upgrade to Web Edition (click here for MPEG video - 367k). C6 WE can also product desktop apps, of course.

Offering information on C6, RKC warned that what he was about to present was subject to change.

C6 will be the best of iBuild and WE2. The most significant enhancement is that the entire IDE will be 32 bit (much applause). This also allows the use of some of the more modern OS features, such as slider and RTF controls (which could not be used previously because of the need to maintain 16 bit compatibility). The announcement that 16 bit targets would not be supported was also greeted with applause.

C6 will also include the early HTML generation technology from iBuild.

Technologically, there will not be a lot of difference between iBuild and C6. The products are aimed at different markets. iBuild is intended for web developers who have HTML skills but not database skills. C6 opens up the iBuild feature set with full embed points and team development capabilities.

RKC noted he'd been asked if he was going to mention the "J-word." "Yes," he said, "I am," and paused. After laughter from the audience, he continued, saying that Clarion is an unbeatable product for desktop and client/server applications. But what about distributed, multi-tier scalable web applications? "Distributed programs are hard to write. It's a different paradigm, a different mindset, a different set of problems. To address this, we need to re-engineer the whole runtime side [of the Clarion language]...We could update the Clarion language with all the features we needed to support this re-engineering. In the process we'd have to change it so you wouldn't recognize it. So we had a better idea. Let's let Sun do our compiler maintenance."

RKC described Sun as having the language (Java) already suited to the task, with features it would be hard and expensive to put into Clarion, such as multi-platform support. Also Java is an industry standard, which means when a new technology comes out the providers make sure it's accessible from Java. This relieves TopSpeed from having to come up with support for that technology.

"Java is a very nice language," said RKC, "[and] many of the concepts are similar to Clarion, particularly if you're working in the ABC paradigm." TopSpeed's mission is to hide the complexity of creating distributed applications, with which developers currently struggle.

The London Development Centre

Although the TopSpeed head office is in Pompano Beach, Florida, development is coordinated from London, England. RKC gave an overview of the development team members, many of whom telecommute, some from as far away as St. Petersburg and South Africa. He stated that TopSpeed's recent recruitment drive covered the entire world.

Note: Many of the development team members, particularly team leaders, have extensive math and/or computer science education from prestigious universities (i.e. Cambridge, Oxford), while others originally came to the attention of the development team as customers and sometimes as third party vendors.

The following summary focuses on the past and present work of the seventeen Development Centre members.

Richard Chapman, VP of Research and Development

• Joined JPI in 1990, head of the Development Centre since 1994
• Developed the Clarion runtime library

Ole Poulsen, VP of Technology

• Borland's third employee, and co-founder of JPI
• Originated the Internet Connect concept
• Main focus is the application broker

Nigel Hicks, Director, Product Development

• Co-founder of JPI
• Developed Clarion IDE framework, Report Writer

David Bayliss, Director, Product Development

• Joined JPI in 1990
• Designed ABC, Wizatrons, compiler, leads Application Paradigms teams

Gavin Halliday, Director, Product Development

• Studied physics at Oxford
• Developed AppGen, leads IDE enhancements team
• Working on Web Edition 2

George Barwood

• Co-founder of JPI
• Designed/developed the TPS driver
• Working in David's team on a Java file system (FileClass)

Claudia Hwang

• Worked on SQL drivers, Dictionary Synchronizer
• Working on AppKits and ABC features.

Roy Hawkes

• Working in David's team on Wizatrons, templates, and ABC features (does most of the template work)
• Formerly with tech support

Jake Smith

• Developed the IC Java classes
• Working in David's team on Wizatrons (and the engine that lays out controls) and AppKits

Andy Ireland

• Formerly with TS Consulting
• Working in David's team on Wizatrons and ABC features, including the Winsock classes

Joe van Niekerk

• Based in South Africa
• Working in David's team on ABC features

Dr. Mourad Mechkour

• Worked on a document clustering system for web information retrieval
• Working in David's team on a Java file system (FileClass)

Ilka Ciocanel

• Worked on Dictionary Editor and Dictionary Synchronizer
• Working in Gavin's team on IDE features, the 32 bit port of the IDE, and the iBuild product

Gordon Smith

• The user interface guru (and author of Compile Manager and Clarion Class Library browser)
• Worked on TopScan and new IDE features
• Working in Gavin's team on IDE features and HTML templates for WE2
• Based in Ireland

Scott Ferrett

• Joined JPI in 1991
• Developed the SQL file drivers
• Working on Nigel's team on driver enhancements

Alexey Solovyev

• Worked on low-level runtime library features
• Working in Nigel's team on low-level runtime library support
• Based in Russia

James Cowan

• Worked on network bandwidth monitoring/throttling
• Working on a Java distributed application model

At the end of the session RKC took questions. He was asked about the status of the new OLE/COM layer. The completion of this work required changes not suitable for an interim release, so it's not clear whether it will be in WE2, but RKC will be recommending that it is (to loud applause). He also said that C6 and Java are "two separate items in our future, not one and the same."

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David Harms is an independent software developer and the editor and publisher of Clarion Magazine. He is also co-author with Ross Santos of Developing Clarion for Windows Applications, published by SAMS (1995), and has written or co-written several Java books. David is a member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA).

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