On Feb 11, 2004, at 7:31 PM, Chris Nolan wrote: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.
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.
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.
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.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.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?
Regards,___/ / __/ / ____/ Ed Leafe http://leafe.com/ http://opentech.leafe.com
Chris
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