LA Fox Presidents Column

The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

XPro User Group News (Con't from page 5)

An end-of-year wait for a solution is far too long for many developers. And, PowerSoft, with PowerBuilder, is beginning to profit from the results of MSFT’s positioning and marketing decisions regarding FoxPro. Even Borland has an opportunity to profit with dBASE for Windows if they have a good product by mid-summer. If you have seen Paradox’s seamless and transparent links to server back-ends and imagine the same transparent links in a decent Xbase Windows product, you can imagine the attractiveness this could have for a Xbase developer who needs a mainstream client/serversolution.

Add all that atop the very real experience of many FoxPro developers of a lessening desire for FoxPro solutions from potential clients, driven by MSFT’s perceived lessening of support for FoxPro, and it all adds up to a genuine problem for the FoxPro developer community. I know of more FoxPro developers now, than at any other time, who are seriously looking at non-MSFT products to use for their primary development work. The solution would be for MSFT to be more forthcoming on their plans for connectivity with 3.0 and to add more marketing emphasis to their FoxPro efforts while de-emphasizing the implied message to use Access and VB instead of FoxPro.

Randy, I suspect FP 3.0 will ship in the 4th quarter, and no sooner. I don’t think PowerBuilder will kill FoxPro, especially when I see so many problems with PowerBuilder’s object model. If you want a pure front-end (terminal only) to client-server apps, PowerBuilder is currently a tool of choice. If you want local data manipulation, PowerBuilder's script language is not near as powerful as FoxPro 2.6 (not to mention FP 3.0). Another key reason PowerBuilder is on a trend to be a limited high-end product not to threaten Xbase on a large scale is that it is priced at three grand (PB Desktop doesn’t count since it has not connectivity).

Fm: Randy Unruh To: John Doe John, I don’t think PowerBuilder will come anywhere

_near_ killing FoxPro. Just that it may strip away a sigificant part of the developer community.

>>.. desktop.. .no connectivity.

That’s not really so important, since if a client can afford a c/s system they can afford to pay for the connections. It is in the one to a couple of dozen users on a LAN where FoxPro has a distinct advantage. But, that type of system (though still prevelant and lucrative) is under a lot of pressure to join the enterprise (ala your comment about JPL having no architecture/ planning implying the need for it). The force driving some FoxPro developers to PB is that pressure plus MSFT marketing’s not keeping the pump primed enough for some developers to get enough business while waiting for 3.0.

Fm: Randy Unruh Fm: John Doe Randy,

>>Just that it may strip away a sigificant part of the developer community. <<

They got Adam Green. Who’s next? cg> The XProBuilder User Group? cBG>

I think the switch is simply because PowerBuilder has better development tools for C/S apps and allows more rapid application development. We’ll have to see if FoxPro 3.0 (or dBASE for Windows) wins them back.

Fm: Randy Unruh To: John Doe John, It’s a significant investment for many developers to

learn a new tool and once they do, many and perhaps most, they do not want to learn something new. I know I’ve said it before in jest that you are not the ordinairy developer but there is a great deal of truth to that. Your life is a bit different from most peoples’ (no judgement in that because so is mine<g>) and they simply do not spend as much time as you do in front of a monitor and keyboard. Having started XPro from the fallout of a silly political war in the L.A. Clipper group (with the people who wanted a broader view of the world than one single instance of an Xbase product), I know firsthand what it is about. The main reason that the Fox group is larger than XPro is because most_ people prefer (actually, have a need) to learn and be proficient with one tool at a time. It has been obvious for some time that FoxPro is a development tool generally superior to Clipper yet this need for many to concentrate on one tool has left a sizable community of Clipperheads behind. Many private discussions with holdout Clipperheads who have finally switched to FP