The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

January 1997

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 ad-

vanced, 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:

* 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 pre-

cisely the area where FoxPro has become legendary for consis-

tently outperforming the competition and for offering blazingly

fast access to large amounts of data.

Although Visual FoxPro does not provide engine-level declara-

tive referential integrity, it has a Referential Integrity Builder,

which can build the required triggers not only to enforce referen-

tial 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 in-

cludes 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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