The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

May 1994

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 forthcom-

ing 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.

To: Randy Unruh

Fm: John Doe

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 lucra-

tive) 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

(Con't, page 7)

Page 6