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The LA Fox Developer Newsletter
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January
1997
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Choosing
(Con't from page 1)
effectively. Nevertheless, each tool has its relative strengths. The purpose of this paper is to help developers choose the tool best suited to their needs. In particular, this paper will examine Microsoft® Access 97, Microsoft Visual Basic® programming system, Microsoft Visual FoxPro database management system, and Microsoft SQL Server.
Microsoft is progressively moving
its
development tools toward a common development environment with shared components between tools. This environment will provide the ability to create a single application by mixing and matching components developed with various languages and tools without leaving the development environment. This trend will enable developers to maximize the power and performance of their solutions by facilitating their ability to build each component of their solution with the most appropriate tool.
MicrosoftAccess
Microsoft Access has changed the image of desktop databases from specialist applications used by dedicated professionals to standard business productivity applications used by a wide range of users. More and more developers are building easy-to- use business solutions on, or have integrated them with, desktop applications on users’ desktops.
Microsoft Visual Basic
The Visual Basic programming system has always enabled developers to quickly and efficiently produce applications for the Microsoft Windows operating system. Visual Basic allows developers to create everything from simple programs to advanced, enterprise-wide client/server applications and to take advantage of the latest three-tier client/server capabilities.
Microsoft Visual FoxPro
Microsoft Visual FoxPro version 5.0 database management system is a powerful object-onented environment
for
database construction and application development Visual FoxPro 5.0 provides the tools developers need to manage data—whether
they
are organizing large tables of information, running queries, or programming a fully developed data-management application for users.
Microsoft SQL Server
Microsoft SQL Server 6.5 combines the best of traditional mainframe computing—centralized security, data integrity, and control—with the best of today’s PCs—ease of use, rich user interfaces, and a variety of off-the-shelf productivity tools. It makes it possible for multiple front ends to share information, enabling the developer to choose the most appropriate tool for the job. SQL Server makes efficient use of networks; because d atabase queries are processed at a centralized server, network :raffic is reduced.
Ed.
Note: Following are some of the more positive aspects of /FP which MS will be promoting.]
Visual FoxPro brings several unique strengths to the Visual ools family, including:
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An object-oriented tool set
for
creating reusable
compo-
nents.
*
A data-centric tool set with a strong local database engi and
client/server connectivity.
*
A powerful interactive data manipulation environment
Microsoft Visual FoxPro 5.0 is a professional developer’s database tool, at the high-end of the desktop database market and in the rapid application development (RAD) and object- oriented programming (OOP) tools markets. The strength of Visual FoxPro lies in its maturity, power, and performance relative to the competition, as well as in the large number of FoxPro developers who have years of experience building high performance database applications.
The Visual FoxPro database engine is a full-featured file-server relational database engine that is optimized for large datasets. Database applications
can
never be fast enough. This is precisely the area where FoxPro has become legendary for consistently outperforming the competition and for offering blazingly fast access to large amounts of data.
Although Visual FoxPro does not provide engine-level declarative referential integrity, it has a Referential Integrity Builder, which can build the required triggers not only to enforce referential integrity but also to supply cascading deletes (automatically delete child records when a parent record is deleted) and cascading updates (automatically change the foreign key in child tabies if the primary key is changed in a parent table).
Visual FoxPro 5.0 has excellent support for ActiveX controls, including controls that act as containers and controls that are bound to a row of data. It does not, however, support controls that bind to more than one row of data. Visual FoxPro is unique in its ability to Vtable bind to ActiveX controls and Automation servers. This provides considerably quicker access to properties and methods and speeds overall performance.
Visual FoxPro
can
control Automation servers and, because Visual FoxPro itself is an Automation server, it can be controlled by other applications. This would allow a Microsoft Excel application, for instance, to
run
a Visual FoxPro routine to mine and collate data.
In the same manner as Visual Basic, Visual FoxPro 5.0 includes the ability to create Automation servers to expose functionality that
can
be used and reused by other applications. A Visual FoxPro developer can wrap existing data manipulation code into an Automation server that can be called from any of the Microsoft Office applications or by the Internet Information Server, to list
two
examples. This allows the Visual FoxPro developer to maintain his or her investment in existing code while taking advantage of the latest advances in component technologies.
Also in the same manner as Visual Basic, a Visual FoxPro Automation server supports Remote Automation to create true
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