Welcome To The New ClarionMag Site!

Posted June 4 2010

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In mid-May of this year we went live with our new ClarionMag site. We've worked hard to retain a familiar user interface, so you may not immediately realize the extent of the changes. But this really is a brand new ClarionMag with many new capabilities and benefits, not all of which may be readily apparent, and not all of which are yet even public.

Some of Clarion Magazine's new benefits include:

• Improved site navigation (you can now page through lists of articles and news items, and your current page is remembered)
• Faster, cleaner page rendering
• Improved, standardized authentication (you can stay logged in if you wish)
• Article ratings, so you can see what other developers recommend
• Personal article lists, including:
  • Unread articles
  • Read articles
  • Favorite articles
  • "Read later" articles
• A "from the archives" random article selection

We'll be posting more detailed explanations of these features in the coming days and weeks.

But this is just the beginning (and yes, we'll have more specific information about these benefits in the weeks ahead). We're also hard at work on something we call The Clarion Roadmap (still in beta). The Clarion Roadmap will make it easier for you to find not just Clarion Magazine content, but Clarion content all over the world wide web. We're in the process of making Clarion Magazine the home of everything Clarion.

And if that's not enough, we have other features in the works which we're not prepared to announce just yet. But if you get the idea that ClarionMag is now in a constant state of evolution, then you have the right idea.

Please note that Clarion Magazine's subscription rates will be increasing on July 18, 2010.

About the technology

This is the third major release of Clarion Magazine. The first version was a mostly static site, but we pretty quickly moved past that to a dynamic site running on MySQL and written in Java. That code base served us well for about a decade, but it was getting a bit dated. About three years ago we began evaluating new platforms, focusing on Windows MVC (Model-View-Controller) web app frameworks. Windows, because we hoped to use Clarion#; MVC because I really like the architecture and had used it in the Java version.

Initially we used Clarion# with the Monorail framework and some custom templates, and that worked well, but Microsoft was ramping up the ASP.NET MVC product. MS has really produced a fantastic MVC toolset (which owes not a little to Monorail and to Ruby on Rails), and their offering eventually became too compelling. If you're doing MVC work in Windows, ASP.NET MVC is the overwhelming favorite.

Early on Clarion# had some issues with ASP.NET MVC so we moved to C#, but we're still using C7 to generate a bunch of the C# code used in the ClarionMag site. We also switched databases from MySQL to PostgreSQL.

I remember Mark Riffey once commenting on how a rewrite of an aging, mission-critical application can breathe new life into a company. That's how we feel about the new ClarionMag content delivery system. And this rewrite goes well beyond this publication; we're also using it for our soon-to-be-launched .NET site, DevRoadmaps.com.

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