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

Question

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

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

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)

Answer 5

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.

Answer 6

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!

Answer 7

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).

Regards

Answer 8

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.

Answer 9

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