The Clarion/PHP templates generate PHP web applications which provide query, navigation, and editing procedures for client/server databases over the web. The generated pages integrate into existing sites both in looks and via links to and from existing pages of the site.
The generated code includes important features necessary for public and high volume sites such as the ability to view only the parts of a database “owned” by an individual user. The resulting applications are highly reliable and very scalable.
There are five important things that Clarion developers should know about the Clarion/PHP development paradigm:
- By providing a system that uses HTML templates and style sheets for the browser client layout, Clarion/PHP completely separates the User Interface from the Application and Business logic. This means the developer is free to concentrate on the application, and the web designer can make the page fit into the existing web design via HTML formatting and style sheets. Either side can make changes without affecting the other, yet not lose them at generation time.
- The code generation system itself is template driven (of course). The developer doesn’t have to know anything about PHP, ADOdb, HTML design, or Cascading Style Sheets to produce a fully functional, fully customized application. As the second Clarion Template chain to produce non-Clarion applications, this is a transition point to a time in which Clarion developers will take their data dictionaries and decide what language to generate by deciding what target they wish to deploy to.
- The system is completely extensible, via embed points. In this case, however, your embeds must consist of PHP statements. The system, as is, is very complete, but as always, Clarion provides unlimited options for the developer. (Note: if maintaining both desktop and PHP targets in a single app, PHP generation ignores the Clarion embed code, and Windows OS generation ignores the PHP embed code).
- The Apache web server is the most popular web server in use today. PHP web applications can be run on the Apache server on any of the platforms supported by Apache and PHP, which inludes Linux and Windows, as well as many others.
- PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development
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