Clarion Handy Tools
Templates, Classes, Utilities, Apps, Projects
 
About the Author

Gus lives in Milton, Ontario, Canada - just west of Toronto.

Gus has been using Clarion as a programming tool from its very inception in the mid 1980's. He has extensive experience in several other programming environments, including C, C++, C#, JavaScript, HTML and CSS. He prefers Clarion over other development platforms because of the power it brings to programming automation with its code-generating template system.

Since 1985, Gus has worked as an independent developer using Clarion to design and build business data applications for all sorts of businesses, from large corporate organizations like American Airlines, Harley Davidson and Honda Motor Vehicles to smaller firms like Canadian Industrial Conveyors.

From 1996 through 2000 Gus was a Contract Consultant and Itinerant Educator with Clarion-TopSpeed before it became SoftVelocity. During that time he developed several Clarion seminar handbooks, including "Mastering Clarion" and "Mastery Of Clarion 4" and taught hundreds of developers about the advanced capabilities of the Clarion Development System.

Earlier called Objects For Clarion, in the DOS era before, TopSpeed and SoftVelocity got involved with Clarion, Clarion Handy Tools have continually evolved with each new release of the Clarion Development Environment.

However, CHT does not really dwell too much on the past. The current CHT version is always focussed on and leverages the latest 4 or 5 versions of Clarion itself, evolving as Clarion evolves.

In His Own Words

"Our vision is a totally integrated tool kit that extends the Clarion Development System naturally and keeps pace with the latest Clarion versions as SoftVelocity develops them. Further, we want to provide an affordable, all-in-one toolkit that is not sold piecemeal so that it costs you thousands to buy all the pieces. Our subscription model spreads your cost over time, provides on-going support and continuity with Clarion and makes initial entry affordable. Best of all, we provide source code, if you're not comfortable with black boxes that are always going out of date each time a new version of Clarion appears."

•••

"CHT (Clarion Handy Tools) developed out of a need to push the boundaries of the Clarion Development System beyond the default behaviours built into the ABC Templates and Classes that ship with the product. We found ourselves constantly revising the 'look and feel' of browses, for instance, to make them look more like Microsoft Windows applications. Out of that came a series of browse enhancement templates like Explorer Browse (EXPB) and Handy Marker Browse (HMB) and more recently ListBox Browse Extender (LBX)."

•••

"And since Clarion had few native Internet connectivity features and our customers were asking for this capability in their applications we developed a series of FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, MAPI, CDO, SMS, Encryption, Compression, File-Server, Data-Server, templates and classes that provide a full set of Internet services, natively from Clarion by leveraging the Internet API's already resident in the Windows operating system."

•••

"With the rapid advancement of the internet and the need to deliver data easily and securely to users via this powerful, but often confusing medium, we've invested many hours in developing templates and classes that integrate internet capabilities into the Clarion IDE in a way that lets you develop internet applications just like you develop desktop applications."

"We've even added a user console right inside your Clarion applications that has the capability of instantly connecting you with web-base code changes, a user support forum, product downloads, on-line examples and across-the-web training; all at the click of a button. In fact, all of this internet connectivity is our own code, available to you as a subscriber, running inside the Clarion IDE environment."

•••

"Our tool set has grown tremendously over the last twenty-seven years. In January, 2023 we begin our 27th year Serving Clarion Developers worldwide.

"Now with CHT (Clarion Handy Tools) in their 27th year, we're using the tagline, "Our Finest Generation" on our home page at www.cwhandy.ca. We've taken code-generation well beyond the relatively narrow confines of the standard Clarion IDE. We intend our tagline to also imply that we're dedicating ourselves to taking what were once ordinary Windows desktop-only Clarion applications and broadening the code you'll potentially be generating to address a range of non-windows devices and, where necessary, to employ non-clarion languages in an integrated way still from the Clarion IDE, or utilizing a variety of code-generating tools we're providing in our toolkit."

"Over the years, we have invested thousands of development-time hours into the CHT toolkit."

"Where else but here can you purchase that much development time, source code and all, for an annual subscription renewal fee of $225.00 per year, while keeping up with new Clarion versions, and getting dozens of new "above-and-beyond-Clarion-next-generation " features at the same time?"

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