The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

July 1994

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 advan-

tage. 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 technol-

ogy to use for implementing a business solution. It

is easy to get all excited about the latest wonder-

fulness 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 applica-

tions in long term use, and has a large, well estab-

lished 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 meth-

odology based on 12 years experience with the

product. Visual Basic books are still barely reach-

ing beyond the Microsoft documentation, with a

decided lack of advice and guidance of the kind

we have just been talking about for serious devel-

opers.... 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 oppor-

tunity 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 develop-

ment tool for people with Xbase orientation. As you

would expect from Adam, the organization and pre-

sentation 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 meth-

odology, and he taught us a sequence of steps you

can take to actually develop an application - some-

thing 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 - al-

though 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.

Announcements

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

(Con't, page 4)

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