The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

August 1999

Special Announcement

The company which owns the parking structure (not NCR) has

decided that they need to charge us for parking during our LA

Fox meetings despite the research done prior to choosing this

site for our meetings. This month they will be counting t. .e

number of cars which park in the garage as a basis for deter-

mining the amount they will charge us each month. So, it would

help our group funds if we can car pool and if some of us will

park on the street in front of the building to reduce the number of

cars they count. They will charge us $3 per car parked this

month for future meetings so with membership fees of $4 per

month you can see why we need to keep our car count down.

We definitely don’t want everyone to park on the street so if you

feel you have a high preference for the garage, please park

there. The board members will be there early for a meeting (all

members are welcome to join us) so perhaps the board mem-

bers are good candidates for street parking.

For those parking in front of the building, that parking is on

Sepulveda, in the pocket close to where you would turn to go

down the driveway to the garage.. It is easiest to walk back

toward El Segundo Blvd. a bit and go up the ramp. Then go to

the 100 building from there. For those parking in the garage,

just take a ticket when you enter the garage as you did last

month. Don’t have a conversation with the lady in the booth.

When you LEAVE, teil the guards you are a member of LA Fox

and they will include your car in their tally. We will be paying a

flat fee this month to the garage prior to the meeting so nobody

should be asking you for any money. Please tell Twila when you

sign in for the meeting if you parked in the garage so she knows

if the garage tally is accurate.

Thanks for your patience and cooperation.

Out and About (Con't from page 2)

been on the lookout for a similar service. Well, thanks to Mike

Feltman, I’ve found, and successfully tested out, another one.

Mind-it, produced by NetMind, is actually slightly better and

easier to use. NetMind is the leader in Change Detection. Over

5 million people are using it to mind Web pages of interest to

them. NetMind lets users track any Web page at any level of

detail — induding text, numbers, images, forms, links or

keywords and be proactively notified via email, pager, cell

phone or PDA when the information changes. They have

solutions for e-businesses, individuals, webmasters and aspiring

webmasters (like yours truly), and inter-/extranets. I’ll be adding

this feature to the LA Fox website soon, so, once again,

everyone can be notified when “the important stuff’ changes.

Check them out at http://www.netmind.com (And for those of

you who are aspiring webmasters, get in touch with me for the

“two-minute tour’ of how to incorporate it into your website.)

Proud Poppa. Russell “We oughta convert to metric, anyway”

Campbell, President of the Atlanta FoxPro Users Group, has a

(Con't, page 8)

Framework (Con't from page 1)

or failure of an application framework is identifying the problem

you want to solve. If you set out to solve the wrong problem you

will, most assuredly, end up with a solution that is wrong for

your needs. Trying to fit an application into a framework that is

working against you is not a pleasant task.

Regardless to whether you are building your own framework or

evaluating one of the many commercial frameworks available,

you need to know your requirements clearly if you want any

chance of being successful.

Below is a list of questions you need to answer in order to begin

identifying your requirements.

* What kind of applications do you build?

* What kind of data sources do you require?

* How do you prefer to use Visual FoxPro?

* What kind of user interface do you use?

What Kind Of Applications Do You Build?

Since the framework supplies the skeleton for your application,

the type of application will influence the way the framework

should be structured. There are many different types of applica-

tions that Visual FoxPro can be used to build including account-

ing, decision support, line of business, research, marketing,

scheduling, and others.

Each of these application types would require a different type of

interaction with the user. Each type of application would have its

own major requirements on the framework and the desired

behavior for one may be a detriment to another. If you are

building a decision support application the requirement for

managing data saving and editing versus viewing modes for

forms may just get in your way. In this case the framework that

fits best would be one that was designed for decision support

systems and not for accounting or line of business systems.

A framework can be designed to meet the requirements of more

than one of these application types, but that needs to be

specifically part of the design of the framework as well.

What Kind Of Data Sources Do You Require?

If your framework is going to be helpful in managing the mun-

dane tasks associated with data management then it has to

handle the types of data you will be using. You may be using

one or more of the following data sources in your applications;

local DBFs, local views, remote views, or Internet/I ntranet data

sources.

A framework that is “everything including the kitchen sink” will

become overly burdensome very quickly if you only use local

DBF tables for your data source. However, if you use the

Internet and remote views then a framework built to handle only

local tables will fall way short of meeting your needs.

How Do You Prefer To Use Visual FoxPro?

(Con't, page 4)

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