Should an Access developer switch to FoxPro

[Clipper2000]

Hi there,

I used to use FoxPro2 (DOS) long long time ago (over 10 years ago) and find it a lot better than dBase 4 at the time. My preference was and still like the product a lot. I became an Access developer not by choice but by circumstance. You see, a lot of companies have Access in their PCs but not FoxPro. Can you believe that some programmer have never heard of FoxPro !

What I like about FoxPro2 was the speedy indexes, and at the time, FoxPro2 was competing with Clipper 5.0 rather well.

So in your opinion can FoxPro beats an application coded in VB6 using either Access or SQL Server back end database?

 

[torturedmind]

an article i found somewhere.

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VFP Elevator Speech
By Harold Chattaway

A term my boss uses to describe a sales tactic is the "elevator speech". Meaning, if you were stuck in an elevator with a potential customer for the typical 3 minute ride, what would you say to convince them to use your product? You have to summarize your case in a very powerful, and persuasive manner. Here is a first draft of a VFP elevator speech...It might be a good thing if we could develop a concise and powerful reason as to why someone should use VFP...I believe this is a start in describing VFP's strengths...What do you think?

"Visual Foxpro is MS's only data-centric development environment. It is part of Visual Studio, MS's "best of breed" set of development tools. VFP is a true object-oriented language that supports inheritance. Using VFP's native database engine can give your website a substantial performance boost over using ODBC or ADO.Since it is a data-centric language, development time can be considerably less than with general purpose languages. VFP can work just as easily with SQL Server as it can its own database, it is totally transparent. VFP is about data, not DBF's. No matter what the datastore is, you can always realize the benifits of VFP's native cursor engine and OOP language.

VFP is a great choice for the middle-tier, data-intensive component of your website..." Possible questions...

1. "Why do I hear more about Access?" Access is a end-user tool that is packaged with MS's other end-user product line, MS Office.It is designed for small single-user desk-top applications. MS Office has many more users then Visual Studio making it much more well known.

2. "I want to use SQL Server not VFP..." Fine, SQL Server can be the data store for VFP. You still need a place to put your business and application logic. Nothing will process the data faster then VFP. (if they can understand the technical side, the COM overhead involved is using ADO could be discussed.)

What other points would be good to promote? The objective here should be to provide real economic and sound technical reasons as to why VFP is a good choice...

Other possible points:

Since VFP has an advanced data-centric, OOP language as opposed to a limited scripting language (ASP), the amount of code that is written is considerably less and much easier to maintain. Scripting languages like ASP are not end all be-all languages. They are frequently misused and the result is unmanageable applications with many thousands of more lines of code then are necessary. If doing an app that handles data, using VFP can realistically save months of development effort. (Seen it!)

This could easily be expanded to include things that haven't been listed here. It could give the VFP community some realistic way of responding to tool choice. Rambling on to a decision maker about how great VFP without real reasons, gets us no where...This might help! If you have any other thoughts that you think should be added, please e-mail them to me and we'll try to update this more than Muzak gets updated on the elevator.

Thanks for your time!
Harold Chattaway
Senior Software Engineer
USdatacenters.com
hchattaway@usdatacenters.com
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hope this answers some (if not all) of your questions. btw, i go for visual foxpro. peace!

kilroy
philippines

"If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get one million miles to the gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside."

 

[Mike Lewis]

Clipper2000,

Can you believe that some programmer have never heard of FoxPro !

Really? I find that hard to believe.

Seriously though ....

The answer to your question depends entirely on what you want to do with the product. As a very rough rule of thumb, Access is fine for simple non-critical data management applications, and is especially suited for use by non-professional programmers and clued-up end users.

VFP, on the other hand, is an ideal tool for large, critical, sophisticated applications involving large amounts of data. It is harder to learn than Access, but it offers immensely more possibilities.

Many thousands of ex-Clipper and dBase programmers have successfully moved over to FoxPro. I hope you will join them.

Last point: The replies you will receive in this forum are not exactly unbiased. We do have a naturally tendency towards the fox here. But at least you will get information based on solid facts and experience, not the prejudices of those people you mentioned who don't know what FoxPro is.

Mike



Mike Lewis
Edinburgh, Scotland

My Visual Foxpro web site:

http://www.ml-consult.demon.co.uk

My Crystal Reports web site:

http://www.ml-crystal.com

 

[Olaf Doschke]

If you already have a foxpro background, though much time past, you should feel home with vfp.

There is a beta version of vfp9 to test:

http://msdn.vfoxpro.com/

You may download it only with broad bandwidth, but it's worth the download.

As you may have noticed, Microsoft strongly supports and pushes Visual Studio .net and the .net framework. So if you are concerned about career options, you may go that direction. If you want easy data integration into your applications I'd say either stay with Access or come over to FoxPro. Interoperability of .net and Foxpro is increasing, so you don't shut .net out of your scope with foxpro. And I'd say the step from VB to foxpro is easier as towards VB.net/ASP.net or even c#.

Bye, Olaf.

 

[craigber]

Be aware that VFP is a very different animal from FP2.x. While you can use many of the same commands, applications developed that way tend not to look too good and do not take advantage of many of VFP's strong points. You will have a big learning curve to understand all the new designers, commands, and most of all...OOP. If you decide to go with VFP, I suggest that you spend some money on books to get you up to speed. The best ones are at

http://www.hentzenwerke.com.

Craig Berntson
MCSD, Visual FoxPro MVP,

http://www.craigberntson.com

Author, CrysDev: A Developer's Guide to Integrating Crystal Reports"