Java Swing - Sun gives the SDK away - the speed and crispness blows net out of the water - And those Swing GUIs are as pretty as you can get. NET was primarily developed for Microsoft's off shore sweat shops in a feeble attempt to crowd out Java, not through a high speed robust interface, but tons of low "garage" efforts out of New Deli.

Java moves between 32 and 64 bit easy as pie - runs on MAC and there's even 64bit DBF engines for it.

The shoot itself in the foot thingie majingie MS is involved in - like VISTA - and IE's non W3C compliance - and alas - C# NET - fat slow interfaces that only low unit labor shops lacking the pride of craft to be involved in.

Java goes anywhere - MS is ending it's run - Rembember TECH - TV - well thats now MS's G4 - and gues what G$ is broadcasting - old reruns of COPS (whatcha gonna do whatcha gonna do when they don't come for you). That about says it all as far as MS is concerned.

Java Swing - you'll love it!


>We are in the process of looking at alternatives for our Visual Foxpro development platform. I've read a number of posts where developers are considering .NET, but I've also read a number of posts that say that .NET takes too long to develop business applications and we should use something else. Our needs are quite different than many developers. We develop for a very niche clientele. Here is a little background and then perhaps someone could chime in and express their opinion about .NET or something else.
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>The bulk of our revenues comes from commercial applications that we distribute nationally. Our primary application is constantly being updated and we issue annual updates with sometimes some very substantial modifications. Consequently, the development platform needs to be flexible and easy to use. Our data files change almost every year and sometimes even more often than that.
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>We do not use dbc's because our application is "multi-client". In other words, a user will use it to maintain multiple client files and our data files need to be easily transported from computer to computer.
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>While there might be many people using our application at any given time, they would seldom be accessing the same data file at any given time. Generally, the data files will contain any where from a hundred to a couple of thousand records. The data is maintained in 8-10 data files (dbfs).
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>One of the most important requirements is the need for a very flexible report writer and the ability to use SQL Select statements to summarize data for printing.
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>While I am sure that .NET would meet our needs, I temper this with the time it would take to become productive with such an overwhelming complex system. At the same time, I've looked at Access 2007 and it looks relatively easy and similar to VFP but I'm worried about speed. I'm sure you've heard that Access will slow down when more than 10-15 concurrent users accessing the same data file.
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>If you've got an opinion, I'd love to hear it. BTW, I know that we've got a long time before VFP becomes totally defunct, but we're trying to allow enough time to master a new development environment as well as convert our existing applications. We are estimating that our primary application might take as long as two years to convert completely to a new language, so you can see why we are actively looking for something to start learning. Incidentally, we are not formally trained programmers. Like so many VFP developers, everything we've learned, we've learned on our own.