Clarion 7 News

We haven't had a lot of time to devote to C7 this past week or two but we're making progress.

We've gotten to the stage where we have isolated a few key C7 bugs and shortcomings that impact our templates. There appear be lots of other C7 template generator bugs and incompatibilities, judging from the PTSS bug report data base. Many of those have not been issues that we've had to deal with since they're not getting in the way of our use of the template language.

Obviously, I'm concentrating on the things that would get in your face if you were taking a C6.3 application built with CHT templates and porting it to C7 via it's application conversion feature.

There aren't a lot of "bugs" and "incompatibilities" that directly impact CHT, but those that I've found are an indication that the C7 template generator has some considerable distance to go in order to become fully C6 backward compatible. My guess, at this point, is that some of these things may never really be resolved in any reasonable time frame, and third parties will just have to bite the bullet and build work-arounds. After a year or two of working entirely in the C7 environment, most of us will have gotten used to the differences and code templates in a way that C6 and C7 can both live with.

At this point in time, I'm heartened that we can release a single template set that's fully compatible with both environments without our having to jump through too many hoops. And without doing a major re-write.

This upcoming week we'll be releasing build 12D1.01 with template changes that are primarily focussed on greater C7 compatibility without affecting how those templates work in C6. We'll be basing this release on C7.4406 which is all we have in hand at the moment. If fixes do come in on bugs we've reported, our workarounds will nevertheless work just as well in these later versions of C7 unless there are actual C7 regressions.

With these upcoming changes we're able - even today - to take apps like HND2.APP, HND3.APP and HNDACCES.APP, copy them to the C7 compile directory, have C7 convert the APP and the DCT, and then generate and compile without having to deal with any significant issues. I'll try and get a video done wherein we'll show you directly the process of getting two or three CHT demo apps to convert, generate, compile and run in C7.

Cheers...
Gus Creces
The Clarion Handy Tools Page
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