On Feb 11, 2004, at 7:31 PM, Chris Nolan wrote:
> Yes, we all know that Microsoft *bought* FoxPro's underlaying
> technology, that is *FoxBASE*! Everything ever called FoxPro has been
> a Microsoft product.
Sorry, you're off by a few years. FoxPro had been out for several
years before Microsoft bought Fox Software. All of the *Visual* FoxPro
releases have been by Microsoft, though. I'm sure you're not familiar
with it at all (Microsoft tries so hard to keep it a secret), but
Visual FoxPro is a powerful object-oriented development system that can
handle all 3 tiers of a typical 3-tier app design. Granted, the data
store part of it is lame compared to a real RDBMS, but it is more than
sufficient for many apps.
> Agreed that FoxPro's xBase implementation is quite quick, but the fact
> that it's pushed as a high-performance multi-user engine is a bit of
> an insult. If one more of my clients calls me saying "Help! Our
> medical management software won't start! Help!" and it turns out that
> a reindex was attempted while someone was busy inserting pictures of
> fresh incissions I'll be very annoyed (and charging accordingly).
Well, I'm sure that I could write some equally horrible scenario using
*any* system out there. And I've seen tons of crap in all languages on
all platforms.
Done intelligently, though, a Visual FoxPro app that uses VFP for the
GUI and business logic, and which uses MySQL as the back end, is an
incredibly powerful combination. I haven't done VFP development that
uses Xbase-type tables in years. You'll never hear about it from
Microsoft, though, because they'd rather sell you the full Visual
Studio package along with a bunch of Microsoft SQL Server licenses.
As an aside, the VFP community has never really integrated into the
whole Microsoft "way" of doing things. There is a large group of
developers who develop business apps for Windows desktops in VFP, and
use MySQL on Linux servers for the data. At a recent VFP conference, a
session on using MySQL was packed.
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Ed Leafe
http://leafe.com/
http://opentech.leafe.com
