LA Fox Presidents Column

The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

LA Fox President’s Column (Con’t from p.2)

repair facilities. The idea is that all this structure and behavior can be pre-programmed, refined, and debugged and used as a starting point for almost any custom application. To build a new custom application, you can then concentrate immediately on the specific data, screens and behaviors for that particular application.

He discusses the same “black box” approach tha Jim did, with examples and thoughts about tradeoffs and how far to go. He includes a list of recommendations about avoiding reinvention of the wheel by using third party products to advantage. Not surprisingly Ken Levy’s GenscmX is on the list, as are Neon’s Fox Express and Micromega’s FoxFire. His approach has many of the same elements as the discussion with Jim but there are enough differences and additional ideas to make it worth your while to read. If you are an experienced developer it will confirm your own ideas or at least generate some good arguments, and you will probably learn in the process, and if you are a novice it will provide many ideas you didn’t even know you wanted to know.

I think the kind of information that we see in this book and in Jim’s presentation reflects the maturity of the FoxPro product. This is a very important consideration for a client considering what technology to use for implementing a business solution. It is easy to get all excited about the latest wonderfulness that will appear in the next release of object-oriented product A or client-server product B, but many clients are better served by a software development product that has been around for 10 or 12 years, has evolved and strengthened through many major software releases, has been the basis for a large number of successful applications in long term use, and has a large, well established community of developers, consultants, trainers, and authors. This is something that is not true of Visual Basic or PowerBuilder at this point. You can’t find any books at all on PowerBuilder, much less one that describes development methodology based on 12 years experience with the product. Visual Basic books are still barely reaching beyond the Microsoft documentation, with a decided lack of advice and guidance of the kind we have just been talking about for serious developers.... important considerations if you are going

to “bet your business” on a software solution or developer.

In the same thought stream, I recently had the opportunity to take a seminar given by Adam Green, on the new PowerBuilder Desktop product. The idea was to provide an introduction to this client server development tool for people with Xbase orientation. As you would expect from Adam, the organization and presentation of information was the best. (If you get a chance for a seminar by Adam, take it, regardless of the topic, and I guarantee you will learn something useful.) It was just a one day seminar, and you can barely get going in that time, but his focus was methodology, and he taught us a sequence of steps you can take to actually develop an application - something not covered in the manuals. He showed that in some cases FoxPro is still ahead of what others think of as “real” database management products - although to be fair he also showed the other side of the coin, where database servers provide benefits well beyond FoxPro file server techniques. He observed that PowerBuilder is designed for complex data management situations, where client-server is the appropriate architecture, and independence of the frontend application and the backend database server is important. Meeting that need introduces a lot of overhead and structure that is overkill for simpler situations. He also described some of the “culture shock” of PowerSoft as they began to deal with a whole new set of issues when they introduced the Desktop version of their product - issues that we are quite familiar with. All of which brings us back to the idea we have discussed before, that no one tool or architecture is appropriate for all requirements, and all the hype about client-server, Visual Basic, and PowerBuilder does not signify the end of usefulness for FoxPro.

The eagerly awaited FoxPro Developers Conference

will be held January 16 through 19- 4 days this time!

- at the San Diego Convention Center. Registration details will be available soon. Block out your calendar and start saving your money, this will be a good one, and no cross country airfare this time.

If you want classroom training, The Information

Management Group offers a series of multi-day

FoxPro courses focused on the Power Tools , which