David Bayliss - C4 - The Big Bang

Posted September 1 1997

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C4 is a revolutionary product that will increase your productivity. An interactive conversion wizard is included to make porting from CW2 as easy as possible, and there have been fundamental changes in the templates to make them easy to understand and maintain. "I only ask that you understand how the new templates and object classes work and make your own decisions", said Bayliss.

Porting Existing Applications

Normally, porting an existing procedure to an OOP program takes a rewrite, but not with C4. An interactive conversion utility is included that reduces porting time by 90%. There are several benefits of this wizard:

• it allows you to decide what type of embed code will be automatically converted
• conversion sequences set for manual conversion are displayed in a three-pane window, showing the original code, the suggested changes, and context-suggested window that helps you decide what changes to make yourself

Code Reduction

An example program was compiled in 16-bit with 20 procedures in one module, with debug on. No 64k limits, no ISP errors, no errors at all! 2100 lines of CW2003 code was reduced to 120 lines using CW4. Could this mean faster compile times???

Classes, Objects and All the New Stuff

The Objects, where most of the functionality is located, are well documented. The Objects are written to allow Clarion to provide even more functionality than ever, and not break third-party products with new releases. A new technology called Smart Objects was also introduced. Smart Objects are programmable, and changeable at runtime. An example of a Browse was used where the user could decide whether they wanted incremental or entry locators at runtime.

The Living Dictionary

File processing code has been moved out of Procedures. This allows for what David calls "a living dictionary" - a dictionary than dynamically adjusts itself depending on your requirements. This technique also allows all priming information and range checking to be coded in one place.

Think Like the Browse

"It only takes a second to understand how to use C4 OOP. Of course, it may take months for that second to appear!!" said Bayliss. Instead of trying to figure out how to make a Procedure do something, you should think like the procedure to best understand what to do.

Where is the Gold

After seeing the code reduction, the new functionality, removal of compiler limitations, and faster compile times, I can't wait to get started with C4.

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