Clipper Programming and Migration Services

Programming

We provide maintenance and enhancement programming services for Clipper applications; including Clipper Summer-87 through 5.x.  If you have the source code and copies of any third party libraries, then we can help you with your Clipper application.  We have been providing Clipper Programming Services since the 80's.

Migration

Clipper applications are a great candidate for migration to Visual FoxPro. Depending on the programming style used with your application, the code can be highly compatible with Visual FoxPro code.  Much of the business logic can be copied with few modifications into a new Visual FoxPro application.  The data structures are also nearly identical to those of FoxPro which simplifies the process of migrating your data.  

While we can migrate a Clipper application to other platforms, such as C#, PHP, ASP or Visual Basic, to name a few, the process requires the new application to be written from scratch.  The logic can still be derived from the old code, but nothing can be copied into the new code from the old code.

Clipper was introduced in 1985 by Nantucket Corporation in an effort to meet the demand for a dBase language compiler.  The 85 release, oddly enough was named Clipper W'84 (Winter 1984). As with FoxPro, the Clipper language was based on the original dBase programming language.

In 1987, Nantucket release Clipper S'87 (Summer 1987). The S'87 version gained a considerable share of the market share as the compiler of choice. In an effort to meet the demands for a more robust version that could handle objects, Nantucket released Clipper 5.0 in 1990. Unfortunately for Nantucket Clipper 5.0 was not well received. The new version was buggy and difficult to learn due to changes in the programming language. The impact of Clipper 5.0 was so negative that it cost Nantucket their market share nearly overnight.

Eventually, Computer Associates purchased Clipper from Nantucket and released a number of versions that corrected 5.0's problems. Clipper has remained in use for some applications, primarily due to the built-in flexibility and its ability to link with other platforms.