Unamed

Clarion: A Lifesaver for Arrakis Publishing

Lifesaving Software

Joe Zeigler's passion for firefighting once developed into a couple of stints as a firefighter. But his most notable contribution to firefighting came through his company, Arrakis Publishing, and the development of the lifesaving FirePrograms software.

At the heart of mission-critical application development, Zeigler’s programs are used at the most discerning fire fighting enterprises in the country. The Naval Academy, Disney World, The Presidio Fire Department, and Carson and Sunny Point Army bases use various applications of the FirePrograms package. The package includes Station Manager for general management, Risk Manager for tracking addresses and storing building information, and Dispatching for interfacing with 911 codes to dispatch firefighters.

"The fire stations that use FirePrograms depend upon our applications," Zeigler said.

Identifying the Solution

In 1993, the fire service industry identified a need for Windows based software and Zeigler was forced to react. He decided to redevelop FirePrograms and evaluated Visual Basic, Visual FoxPro, Delphi, PowerBuilder, C++, Dataflex and Clarion. Zeigler and his team meticulously inspected each tool’s development speed, middleware, salability, stability and flexibility.

"Clarion was so far ahead of the competition that it was difficult to even make a comparison," Zeigler said.

Arrakis Publishing knew they could produce a Windows version of FirePrograms in only months with Clarion as opposed to years with other tools. Five months later two developers brought the first Windows version of FirePrograms to market.

"At that time in our industry, customers stopped buying DOS applications. We had an immediate need to release a Windows version of FirePrograms or face going out of business. No other development tool would have allowed us to react so quickly to the changing market," says Zeigler.

"Clarion was so far ahead of the competition that
it was difficult to even make a comparison."

Learning the Language

"Clarion’s syntax was so easy to learn; we were productive within a day of opening the box. It is especially fast," Don Burchell, the lead developer, said. "[Clarion] takes most of the drudgery out of code development. Unlike many tools, Clarion permits hand coding where necessary without sacrificing the benefits of the automatic code generation technology. There are no limits."

"In addition," Zeigler said, "Clarion code is so comprehensible that it is self-documenting. This is important in a growing business where new programmers have to work on other people’s code. We all know how much programmers hate to document code. With Clarion, it isn't a problem."

"Clarion’s syntax was so easy to learn; we were productive within a day of opening the box. It is especially fast."

Clarion applications are built on an object-oriented framework called the Application Builder Class (ABC) Library. The ABC Library is a comprehensive and versatile set of objects that renders reusable services for accessing, processing and displaying data. This provides developers with applications that are easy to customize and easier to maintain.

Continuing Success

Arrakis Publishing has developed FirePrograms using Clarion since 1993.

"Every year we evaluate other development tools and every time we are amazed at how superior Clarion handles rapid application development in comparison to the rest of the market," Zeigler said.

Clarion is the answer to the call of business application developers. Arrakis Publishing is proof as they continue to flourish and move toward becoming the standard software package for the firefighting enterprise

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