clipper database versus ?

Question

I used clipper a lot years ago. Now i want to do it again for fun but my disks are ruined sitting in the garage all these years. How can I get it back? Also, I heard a lot about visual basic. Is this sort of the same thing? Help me get back into my hobby because I seriously need one.

Answer 1

Clipper was a compiler for DBase files. What you're talking about is PC (or personal) databases. A lot has changed over the years, although some of the same major players are still around. The market is pretty much owned by Microsoft these days, with Microsoft Access, although I've always had a soft spot in my heart for Borland Paradox, which after a lot of sale and consolidation, is now owned by Corel and sold as part of Corel's Wordperfect Office Pro suite.

Microsoft has always made sure that VB was able to work with its office product line, so you can write VB apps that programmatically manipulate Access tables.

Depending on what you want to do, VB + Access may take you back to the old days of your Clipper development.

Eventually most people migrate to the world of SQL and there's a lot of exciting opportunities for applications in that world, and in particular with open source relational databases like MySQL and SQLite. This is after all, the world of the internet, and you might find free internet technologies running on your computer to give you all the excitement and iteration of the old DBase/Clipper days, along with the new options of browser based apps, and multi-tier applications. There are lots of packages out there that provide you an "Amp" stack out of the box: apache webserver, php web language, and mysql database. Apache PHP and SQLite is a very exciting single computer environment, that provides a lot of a amazing capabilities in terms of extending the database itself by using PHP functions.

Clipper was very much of its time: a day where computers were slow and there were big performance wins in taking dbase code and compiling it into a standalone .exe. Those days are long gone now, and computers are so fast, that interpreted environments are more than capable of providing response that would blow away the fastest clipper progs of yesteryear.