What is the best way today to maintain clipper 5.3 code?

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Are there any successor products on DOS, Windows or Linux?

Pallmall answered 21/11, 2008 at 19:7 Comment(0)

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There are quite a few Clipper compilers available: Harbour, CLIP, and xHarbour, to name a few of the free ones.

Bakeman answered 21/11, 2008 at 19:18 Comment(0)

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It's no doubt, the way to go is Harbour. Don't waste time with projects abandoned like CLIP or xHarbour.

Lambert answered 27/9, 2010 at 5:54 Comment(0)

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Harbour is 99.99 percent compatible. Also you can call win DLLs easily. I am maintaining that way adding new features with writing new DLLs.

Ethos answered 28/6, 2011 at 3:2 Comment(0)

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I've used CLIP in Linux... worked awesome. Has a lot of goodies you won't find in Standard DOS CA-Clipper.

Eggbeater answered 21/11, 2008 at 22:14 Comment(0)

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FlagShip is a well-supported, stable Clipper compiler that works on all flavors of Unix. Some major retail chains in the US are still using Clipper-based point of sale systems that have been ported to FlagShip on Linux. It has some nice object-oriented extensions and a really easy way to drop into inline C code where needed.

Scrimpy answered 4/2, 2009 at 14:21 Comment(0)

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Don't! That's the best way! Move into a modern language (C#, VB.Net, Java, OO Cobol(!), Python or Ruby).

I like C# and OO Cobol better (www.alchemysolutions.com, www.Veryant.com, www.microfocus.com, www.legacyj.com, www.cobol-it.com, www.ibm.com/cobol).

Misconception answered 4/11, 2009 at 21:39 Comment(1)

Nice. You advise the OP to use a modern language, then you suggest Cobol. – Jonna 23/3, 2010 at 13:53

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xHabour, I've found, sometimes will work on printers and sometimes it doesn't. Which is quite aggravating. So, I'm not using it much anymore.

I have a niche maintaining and migrating old Clipper and Foxpro apps. The biggest problem, especially in Clipper, is third party libraries. Such code won't compile in Windows Clipper compilers and it's not usual for a Clipper app to use several such libraries. Sometimes the code has been ported to Windows but often it hasn't been.

BTW, I'm not surprised when yet another large corporation calls, saying they have a mission-critical app that's been running since 1992 in Clipper or FoxDOS and can I migrate it into Windows. Clipper is like COBOL.

Lailalain answered 2/1, 2011 at 18:12 Comment(0)

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CA Visual Objects (VO) is the official successor, however don't expect to just recompile your Clipper 5.3 app into VO. All of the screen interface code will need to be rewritten for a new UI.

Hinduism answered 21/11, 2008 at 21:57 Comment(0)

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I'm still doing Clipper 5.3 maintenance programming. It's by no means a dead language, and there's a vibrant user community on news:comp.lang.clipper (also accessible via Google Groups). If you go over to xHarbour, there's a strong presence at news:comp.lang.xharbour (ditto)

Decrescendo answered 24/11, 2008 at 4:31 Comment(0)

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Don't even think about using FlagShip 6. It's incredibly slow compared to the very nice FlagShip 4, but you must use FlagShip 6 on Linux if you want to have an up-to-date server (newer glibc). Harbour is no doubt the way to go now!

Virus answered 12/5, 2009 at 18:50 Comment(0)

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I've never used it, but I understand that Vulcan.NET was created to provide an upgrade path from Clipper/xBase/Visual Objects to the .NET Framework. Might be worth a look.

Faultless answered 23/2, 2010 at 4:41 Comment(0)

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