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Clarion at 40: Four Decades of Development
Forty years on, Clarion is still moving: SoftVelocity is developing Clarion 12, developers are shaping its progress, and a long-standing community is looking ahead.
An anniversary look at today's Clarion development, the people behind it, and the history worth preserving.
Clarion celebrated its 40th anniversary in April 2026. That's a significant milestone for any development tool, but there's considerably more happening in the Clarion world today than a look back at its history might suggest.
Over the past several months, SoftVelocity has been delivering an impressive series of Clarion 12 beta updates. Development has been moving at a brisk pace, with substantial improvements to Unicode support, the development environment, reporting, database access, and other areas of the product. Equally encouraging has been the level of participation from developers testing these changes and the responsiveness of SoftVelocity to their feedback.
For developers who may have wondered about the pace of Clarion 12 development earlier on, the recent activity provides plenty of reason for optimism.
Clarion 12: Development and Community Feedback
One of the most encouraging aspects of the recent Clarion 12 work is how closely the development process has become connected to feedback from the people using it.
Recent beta releases have introduced significant improvements throughout Clarion 12, including expanded Unicode support, enhancements to the IDE and Dictionary Editor, improvements to the report previewer, better diagnostic tools, and refinements to database handling and application generation.
Many of these changes address specific issues and requests raised by beta testers. The results are appearing in successive releases, demonstrating that developers' feedback is being heard and put to use.
SoftVelocity has also established new community forums, providing a more accessible and organized way for developers to communicate with the company and with one another.
The forums offer dedicated areas for support, announcements, general discussions, and bug reports. Importantly, bug reports use a structured format that helps developers provide the information needed to reproduce and investigate problems. It's a practical improvement that can shorten the distance between identifying an issue and getting it resolved.
The beta program also gives developers who have purchased Clarion 12 an opportunity to participate directly. They can request to join the program, test upcoming changes in their own applications, and provide feedback to SoftVelocity as development progresses.
Taken together, the frequency of beta updates, the improvements being delivered, and the ongoing exchange with developers paint an encouraging picture of Clarion 12's continuing development.
AnyScreen Remains Part of the Picture
There has also been encouraging news regarding AnyScreen.
Robert Zaunere recently confirmed that Marko and his team continue to receive Clarion beta builds and that AnyScreen is working well. He also indicated that Clarion 12's Unicode improvements could provide additional opportunities for AnyScreen's continued development.
Further announcements about AnyScreen, including the AnyScreen Resizer, will come when the team has news to share.
For developers who have invested in AnyScreen or are interested in extending their Clarion applications beyond traditional Windows desktops, it's good to know that the project remains involved with ongoing Clarion development.
A Look Back at Forty Years
Clarion 1.0 first appeared in April 1986, introducing a practical approach to building database applications that would become familiar to generations of developers.
Through the original Clarion Software years, the TopSpeed era, and subsequently SoftVelocity, Clarion evolved into a comprehensive development environment supported by an extensive community of developers, consultants, educators, and third-party software publishers.
That community has produced an enormous amount of technical knowledge over the decades. Resources such as the Clarion Magazine article archive, the Icetips technical articles, and the PAR2 archive preserve a valuable part of that history.
ClarionDesktop is being developed in part to make those resources, along with the products, tools, and communities supporting Clarion today, easier to discover.
Forty years after its introduction, Clarion continues to be used to build and maintain real business applications. SoftVelocity continues to develop the product, third-party developers continue to extend its capabilities, and the community continues to contribute.
That's a solid foundation for Clarion's next chapter.