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The LA Fox Developer Newsletter
May 1994
The LA Fox Developer is the monthly newsletter of the LA Fox User Group. The purpose is information sharing among application developers and users working with FoxPro.

LA Fox Address:
LA Fox User Group
Chuck Williams
(310) 539-9439
977 Ashbndge Lane
Harbor City, CA 90710
LA Fox Board of Directors
Chuck Williams, President
David Van Valkenburg, Treasurer
Allen Garfein, Membership
George Dvorak
Warren Rekow
Bill Seldon
Barry Lee, Newsletter Editor
Gerg Dunn
Kns Dahlin
The newsletter contains regular columns and articles from other user groups.
XPro User Group
Randy Unruh
(310) 399-9159
2210 Wilshire Blvd. - #161
Santa Monica, CA 90403
OC MS FoxPro Developers Group
John Miller
(714) 661-5264
Subscriptions
The annual membership fee for the LA Fox
User Group, including subscription to The LA
Fox Developer Newsletter, is $45.

Disclaimer
Neither the LA Fox User Group, the XPro User Group, the OC MS FoxPro Developers Group, their officers or board of directors or their members make any express or implied warranties of any kind with regard to any information disseminated, including, but not limited to, warranties of merchantability and/or fitness for a particular purpose.
Opinions provided by newsletter articles, or by speakers, members, or guests who address the meetings, are individual opinions only, and do not necessarily represent the opinions of the group. All opinions and information should be carefully considered, and the group is not liable for any incident or consequential damages in connection with, or arising out of, the furnishing or use of any information or opinions. Brand names and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
LA Fox President’s Column (Con't from page 1)
be maintained rather than aggressively expanded. So we will have to find other ways to convince clients that FoxPro is a good basis for building solutions to their particular problems - lamentable but not a show stopper.

On the other hand client-server database products are now in the spotlight promising marvelous things to all men. The group discussed the prospect of FoxPro developers shifting focus to SQL Server and Visual Basic. The recent move by PowerSoft to make available a low cost desktop version of PowerBuilder attracted a lot of discussion. In fact, I have started up the learning curve on client server applications and products, and find them to be exciting and powerful - but not as replacements for FoxPro. They are solutions for a different class of problem. These are expensive solutions to large corporate-level distributed data management problems. I realize I am speaking in generalities and there certainly are areas of overlap, but when you address the kind of problems that FoxPro has traditionally addressed, client server tools are not the right ones. When you addresses the kind of problems client server does best, then FoxPro is not the best solution.

A related idea is using FoxPro as a front end in a client server application. I happen to think FoxPro will make an outstanding front end because of its excellent data management capability, which opens a much wider set of alternatives for splitting the work between front end and back end. Database servers on big server class hardware platforms are powerful, but I think many applications will want to offload much of the sorting, grouping, and calculating work to the front end so they can handle the joins, transaction management, integrity checking and security work on the backend for a larger set of users. But I think that role will not be valid until FoxPro 3 time when the interface is not so awkward to implement and the connectivity to SQL Server is more robust.

I think future directions for a FoxPro developer should be based on what market you want to serve and what class of problems you want to solve. If you are an individual contractor or very small company, then FoxPro is a great tool for addressing the same kinds of problems and clients as it has always done. Client server opens up new kinds of opportunities and if you want to address them, then switch to the new products. But you should realize it is a different game - you are dealing with much larger contracts, with more formal business relations - the cost of playing the game is higher, with bigger hardware platforms, more expensive software, and more expensive training - and development requires more attention to methodology than we usually practice in the FoxPro world.

(Con't, page 3)
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