[Leaplist] Fwd: Re: [Harbour] Release 1.0.0 FREEZED

[Phil Barnett]

On Thursday 14 August 2008 11:52:17 am Steve Litt wrote:

> Would Harbour be good for a person who didn't program Clipper/Xbase back in
> the day? 

Or dBase. or RBase. or Foxpro. or Alaska xBase++. or Paradox.

A lot of the current database applications grew out of these simple 
beginnings. For example Microsoft purchased Foxpro and put the amazing bit 
mapped indexing into SQL Server 6.5, thus giving the world a huge leap in 
capability and speed in MSSQL.

> Why would a small business choose it over RAILS or PHP web app? 

Strong typing. Early or late binding. Object oriented or traditional or mixed. 
Multi platform. Replaceable data drivers. Replaceable IO interfaces. Code 
blocks. The list goes on and on.

Rails is not a language, it's a framework so it's not a comparison. You could 
build Rails in Clipper just like you could build it in Ruby.

Quoted from Wikipedia... 

"The original developer of dBase was C. Wayne Ratliff.[3] In 1978, while 
working as a contractor at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Ratliff wrote a 
database program he called "Vulcan" (after Mr. Spock of Star Trek) to help 
him win the office football pool. Written for his kit-built IMSAI 8080 
microcomputer running PTDOS, he based the program on JPLDIS (Jet Propulsion 
Laboratory Display Information System), a mainframe (Univac 1108) data base 
product developed by JPL's Jeb Long and Jack Hatfield. Long finished JPLDIS 
after Hatfield's departure from JPL.

According to Ratliff, the language in JPLDIS was a simple, command-driven 
language intended for interactive use on printing terminals. There is some 
evidence that JPLDIS was influenced by Tymshare Corporation's mainframe 
database product called RETRIEVE.

In early 1980, George Tate, of Ashton-Tate, entered into a marketing agreement 
with Ratliff. Vulcan was renamed to dBase, and the software quickly became a 
huge success."

dBase forked (not literally) at about the dBaseII timeframe into two 
competitors, Clipper and Foxpro. Both of those languages evolved well beyond 
their dBaseII origin while retaining virtually 100% backwards compatibility. 
Harbour is 100% compatible with Clipper 5.2e, considered the best version of 
Clipper ever. (5.3b was the last version sold, but those revisions were not 
created by the original team) Clipper 5.2e is 100% backwards compatible with 
dBaseIII+.

So, there is about a 30 year history behind this language. At one time, it was 
the single most popular language (I'm talking about all the dialects here) 
for development of business applications. This is a very mature langage with 
a ton of inherent capability.

> Does it work with Postgres and MySQL (I couldn't find the answer on the
> website). 

Yes. But not only that. The data connector layer is replacable by multiple 
data drivers at the same time, so you can have dozens of data connectors to 
all different types of data and use the exact same syntax to read/write the 
data. And that makes it future proof. You can add a new data driver layer and 
bolt it on any time to cover the data du jour.

> Can Harbour project be used to whip out a quicky 5 table app in a 
> day? 

It's a compiler of a language. If you are good with it, you can do just about 
anything. You can imbed inline C or inline ASM into your programming code 
files and the inline code will be compiled directly into your objects.

You can do pretty much anything with Harbour.

As you saw the other day, Harbour is a compiler that is written in C and can 
be compiled on any platform with a C compiler. The list of C compilers 
supported today is extensive, so the platform coverage is extensive. From 
ANSI C to any modern C compiler.

> Can Harbour be used to create webapps? 

Yes, and CGI. It's currently being used for that in a lot of places.

> When are you going to give a 2  
> hour presentation on Harbour?

Not any time soon. I'm going to wait for the documentation to catch up.

And to be perfectly honest, I stopped programming in Clipper when I moved from 
my previous position at Disney 5 years ago. I'm sure I could pick it right 
back up, but I'm rusty...

-- 
Waiting for sunspots.

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