Ed Leafe wrote:
> 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.
>
Well, the miserable sod that has that history up mentioning the product
FoxBASE 2.0 has incurred my wrath. I will ensure that their OS options
from now on are limited to the awful kludges that are OpenServer and
UnixWare.
I've done some FoxPro stuff in the past, but have found that there are
ways more suitable to my needs for developing database-driven solutions.
The multi-platform aspects of Java, PHP and C++ with wxWindows are just
a few examples.
>> 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.
>
I don't know if you could hope to match the horrible mess I'm referring
to above with anything other than Jet. Seriously, the person who
deployed this software needs to have a few things done to them.
Interestingly, it's a FoxPro 2.6-based app.
> 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.
>
Out of curiosity, have you ever migrated an application built using FP
or VFP along with XBase-type tables to MySQL? There's a developer I know
who would be interested in doing so and is looking for some advice if
you're interested.
> 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.
>
There's been a few threads on this list in the past regarding the
difficulty in matching VFP's native datastore performance when using
MySQL (mainly due to VFP's Rushmore optimisation engine). Have you
experienced this problem to any degree?
> ___/
> /
> __/
> /
> ____/
> Ed Leafe
> http://leafe.com/
> http://opentech.leafe.com
>
>
Regards,
Chris
