VFP and OOP, your opinions...

[weedz]

Hello you'all,

I have been on this forum for one month now, and I must say that the readiness of helping other fellow programmers is very good if not perfect.

I have been in FoxPro for 3 years now and in VFP for the last 2. So I am not that experienced as some of you but still I have this following question about the use of VFP.

Reading a lot of threads in this forum, I see that a lot of the developers still use VFP as I used to use FoxPro 2.6. for DOS.
I can understand that some of you had to convert old FPW or FoxPro DOS projects to save time.

Personally I have totally fallen in love with the OOP capabilities of VFP, it is easy to subclass and you can really split your user interface from your business (rules) layer and your data layer (3-Tier or n-Tier).

But still I see a lot of questions about manipulating data via grid cells, forms etc. and using forms. I do not see many questions about classes and class inheritance and for that matter design patterns.

I was just wondering, haven't most developers discovered the beauty of OOP and VFP...?
Weedz
veld4663@exact.nl

'It never hurts to help...' - Eek the cat.

 

[BlindPete]

I have, and use it every opportunity. Unfortunately I'm also lazy. Often I find it simpler/quicker for me to use the old FOX2 knowledge to reslove a minor issue.

When I OOP, is when I'm designing some universal tool that I'll use in many apps. Or when I'm starting an app from scratch.
-Pete

 

[TomasDill]

Weedz, there are no many people yet here that make their own frameworks, thus working with classes a lot. Most programmers use popular frameworks now without much of class programming.

Another reason might be bad knowledge of OOP at all. there are many developers that moved to VFP recently and are not quite good in OOP at all.

In addition, most questions here related to grids, for example, might be related to classes too - what if question asked during grid class development? OOP is just a way of programming. Questions asked here mostly relates to the components of VFP, that, of course, could be used either in the UI or classes without diference.

Anyway, when you have difficulties with managing classes/class libraries or something related to OOP, you can ask here


Vlad Grynchyshyn
vgryn@softserve.lviv.ua

http://www.softserve.lviv.ua

The professional level of programmer could be determined by level of stupidity of his/her bugs

 

[SBTBILL]

I don't use the classes as much as I could\should because I am used to using forms that are accessable from multiple places. The latest edition of SBT PRO has got me looking at it more because of private data sessions and createobject. Hadn't really seen the value of those before. As to inheritance, it never seemed to be important and still doesn't really turn me on. Changing the form was good enough, since every form tends to be an object.

One other point is that a lot of my customers use Crystal Reports. It supports 2.6 tables but requires ODBC drivers to use 3.0 tables. Thus if I use a 3.0 table I start getting complaints and have to set it back.

Bill Couture

 

[weedz]

Thanks for your opinions guys.

I totally agree with Vlad, OOP is just a form of programming. But I must admit, OOP programming in VFP has made me thinking more about structured programming and thinking of implementing objects than before.

I also started without OOP, the FP2.6 way in VFP in the beginning.
After reading many articles, checking out some other VFP applications and Framweworks (it is always good to see how others do it..;-) ), I jumped into the world of OOP and I must say, I wouldn't want to go back.

Especially in cases where you can change/implement things in your baseclass one time iso having to change/implement the same thing in dozens of places.

Thanks again,

Weedz
veld4663@exact.nl

'It never hurts to help...' - Eek the cat.