The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

May 1994

The LA Fox Developer is the monthly newslet-

ter of the LA Fox User Group. The purpose is

information sharing among application develop-

ers 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 warran-

ties 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

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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 learn-

ing 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 distrib-

uted 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 method-

ology than we usually practice in the FoxPro world.

(Con't, page 3)

Page 2