Re: Alternatives To Foxpro

I think one way to look at it is that dbase's time has come and gone. We may love FoxPro and what it can do, but the platform it currently running on is getting crumbly for VFP (especially the desktop) and that will only get worse as time goes on.

While there maybe alternatives that will let you continue to use dBase languages, the question you have to ask yourself is: Do you really want to be in that market niche where few people will be, where there are few peers, support or companies/OOS devs to keep building new features and add-ons? Who will keep extending functionality and innovating with recent market trends to improve the experience? Who will support it? ANd what developers will want to extend it with their own tools? I think you'll find that there are precious few folks who want to be the leaders to take a product forward and not just make it run as other tools have.

We already know how awkard it is to be in a niche market and jumping off the VFP wagon onto an even less known dBase language solution is only going to aggrevate that. Yes you can use your existing code and skills, but there is not likely to be any community or support worth mentioning.

There are other solutions out there for dynamic languages that are more like FoxPro (although none have the data richness of VFP of course - and when that's taken out, a lot of the dynamic/static advantages/disadvantages come out a wash IMHO) that are popular and actively developed with large developer communities around them. Especially for the Web there are LOTS of choices. For desktop the choices are there too but they are pretty ugly with runtimes of Web frameworks.

Either way I think dBase had its time, but it's not going to come roaring back - ever. And if you stay in that niche then you might as well stick with VFP which I think is still the biggest player in the dBase space (for whatever that's worth).

+++ Rick ---

Hi all,

Over the last few years there have been many discussions to the eventual end of MS Visual Foxpro. There have been several projects sprung up that have attempted to either extend the life of VFP or become an alternative replacement. The replacements have either totally failed or do not resemble VFP in any such way.

The logical evolution for desktop development in Windows appears to be with little question the .NET framework. My biggest bugbear with this is that although I love C# as a language the closest language to VFP is VB.NET and to be honest doesn't come close.

Giving this some long thought I questioned why I would miss VFP. I have totally accepted .NET and C# yet something was missing. From time to time I end up cutting some VFP code for legacy systems that have not migrated yet and then it struck me. Its nothing more than the VFP language itself that I will miss, not VFP. Looking at the roots of this, VFP was based on the DBase language, my initial searches for VFP language alternatives proved pretty fruitless. I specifically wanted to find the language reincarnated in .NET, no joy.

I was so disheartened as I was coming to the realisation we may actually be seeing a death of a language. People could argue the langauge is outdated, but the truth is it isn't really. It's just a language and it can evolve sensibly like any other. There are many other successful dynamic languages like VFP about.

I then thought harder. VFP fell out with Ashton-Tate back in the day over the DBase langauge. If you look at this single fact, the VFP language is truely a Dbase language at its heart. This made me look, and what do you know, there it is, DBase. DBase appears to still exist and under what seems to be something close to its original company. The website is: http://www.dbase.com.

It appears the language still lives on in a more modern way. It is a shame it is not based on .NET, not sure if this is a disadvantage though. My biggest concern is why I have not picked up on this in any forums anywhere when people were looking for VFP alternatives? Is this purely on the basis of the history between VFP and DBase? You would think those days were gone? I'm interested in whether people even realised DBase even still existed? Whether or not I look at this any closer, I'm just humbled by the fact that we have not seen a death of a language. For me that would be a total tradgedy.

What are peoples thoughts on this?

Regards

Richard