rhe LA Fox Develoner Newsletter

June 1994

XPro User Group News (Con’t from Page 5)

purchasers are more influenced by advertising than the average xBase developer.

presentations decides on a single product. Any product even FP. They should be summarily dismissed. There are so many products out there and so many user requirements that any product will be the wrong choice for some of them. So it takes 3 weeks to develope a project that should have taken 3 days. In a huge corporate organization or a mega government organization it doesn’t make a difference. To a 15 person company it can break them. FP has its place, PB has its place, Access has its place, VB has its place a large organization should use ALL of them. They fill different niches. I have worked on numerous large corporate projects that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars of programmer time. Using the wrong product for the few of these per year that a large MIS shop will be doing could result in millions per year in over expenditures. If the company grosses a few billion who will know?

and then did a small app. You can take a app that should take 90 minutes with FoxExpress and another 30 minutes to do the reporting with FoxFire! and write it in VB in a couple of weeks. It won’t have the field level validation that FP does so well. You won’t have the flexibility of having your users do their own reports as FoxFire! does so well. And if your user enters a bunch of records say 20 to 100 thousand you won’t have acceptable performance. But you will have a VB app. OTOH there are places where VB is very useful. Each project needs to be evaluated as to what is needed and then the tool chosen.

were saying COBAL is the only way to develop industrial strength apps. 18 months ago they were saying MainFrames will be the backbone of the corporate environment for the forseeable future. xBase has been the “garlic” and “Wooden Stake” to these vampires for almost a decade. (Anything but xBase).

It has been reported here in the fora) who do a measly 20 + billion per year have committed their least important function (accounting) to a modified

SBT package that runs under FP. Give me a break. FP will be around for a while. It will evolve. Great. It won’t look like it does now. FP as it is now used bears no resemblance to FB+. The two languages share a few commands that work in a similar manner.

They have an interview with Rodger Heinen senior vp of Database and Development tools of MSFT. In the first two paragraphs he mentions FP twice. To quote “With products like FoxPro you can build line-of- business applications....” “Likewise, FoxPro is the only database development tool that provides full Windows, Mac and MS~DOS support.”

baggage around. Take a simple add, edit delete screen with field level validation and record locking and rewrite it in VB. The first 90% will be a snap the rest of it will take longer than you can ever imagine. VB has some baggage that is just as frustrating. Also plan on a good $1,000.00 for third party addons to make VB work.

Here’s something that drifted into my mailbox from the Internet. Thought you might enjoy it.

Electrical Engineering vs. Computer Science

Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. “What do you think this is?”

One advisor, an engineer, answered first. “It is a toaster,” he said. The king asked, “How would you design an embedded computer for it?” The engineer replied, “Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantizes its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I’ll show you a working prototype.”

The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately

(Con’t, Page 7)

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