If you have been using Softvelocity's Clarion for any reasonable period of time you have probably already heard of Gus Creces' Handy Tools. I have really been stumped about writing a review of the tools because - there are just so many of them! That's right, just about anything you can imagine is included in this all inclusive toolset. Like most Clarion developers, I have quite a collection of third party add-ons or templates that I use to add features to my applications. One of the first things you may want to add is a better query feature than the QBE features already included in Clarion - and my choice for the Category is the Query Wizard from Clariontools.com , however, CHT includes substantial querying capabilities that some may prefer. Later, the Clarion developer might want to add some fancy additions to the standard Clarion browse screens. In my case, I selected the XPlore Templates, but those same capabilities are also included in the Clarion Handy Tools.
Let's go further, suppose you wanted to add some additional emailing capabilities, or web enable a Clarion application. A popular choice for doing these things is NetTalk from Capesoft - but again, the Clarion Handy Tools (CHT for Short) include these features and make it easy to do all sorts of things.
In fact, I can really think of only one thing that I am including in my applications that is not already included in some form or other in CHT - Charts and Graphs. My choice for that over the offering in the same category from SoftVelocity is another Capesoft product - Insight Graphing - IG went Gold in December and I have been busy adding charts and graphs to many of my applications - check back for more on this next year.
If I could go back in time, rather than buy specific templates for specific things I wanted to do, I would probably have just bought a subscription to the Clarion Handy Tools and been done with it - yes, I do have a subscription, now! However, when I first started I didn't - I bought bits and pieces as I needed them.
So how is having so many tools available a bad thing? It is kind of like the junk drawer you have at home, you know whatever you are looking for is in that drawer, but there are just so many other things in that drawer it is sometimes hard to find what you went looking for in the first place. Sometimes you start looking for one thing in the drawer and discover something you hadn't even thought about in a long time - and then you forget what you started looking for and go off with your newly rediscovered treasure instead. Well, I have to apologize to Gus - the Clarion Handy Tools are much more organized than my junk drawer is and you can find what you need pretty easily.
I mentioned subscription and that may have some of you gripping your wallet too tightly - loosen up. If a product was only rarely updated, as some are, a subscription might not be that great a deal. Many developers of third party tools only release upgrades when, for example, Softvelocity releases a new version of it's program. However, in the case of the Clarion Handy Tools upgrades are not only frequent, they often add substantial treasures that you didn't even realize you needed or wanted. Kind of like Christmas all year long!
Because I already owned a number of third party tools, I am constantly on the Clarion third party newsgroup. You will see a lot of different vendors and their products talked about there, but very little (relatively speaking) of the Clarion Handy Tools. Why? Gus has provided his own website/newsgroup for his subscribers to get support, get the latest product news and so on. This does a couple of things: it showcases what CHT is capable of producing, and it keeps Gus out of the Third Party NG, for the most part. Since the CHT toolset is so comprehensive if he only used the Clarion Third Party Newsgroups -- other vendors might accuse of him of hogging the group for his own product. On the downside, this means that I need to visit not only the Clarion Third Party NG, but also Gus' subscriber site.
If you are a new Clarion Developer, before you start picking out individual templates, visit the CHT web site. Check out the tools and maybe email Gus. You owe it to yourself. If you have been a Clarion developer for some length of time you already know the value of a CHT subscription. Time to renew? :-)
Happy New Year from DeveloperReviewed.com