>A consultant friend I know has been struggling with Access 2.0 as the front end for developing some client-server applications. Now he is considering changing platforms to PowerBuilder, but first he wants to know what I think of PB vs VFP, but I've never used PB.
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>Please reply if you are familiar with PowerBuilder 5.0 and can give any comments on its strengths and weaknesses compared to VFP 5.0.

I've got to say that going from Access to PB is going to be like going from a really nice Dodge Neon to a Formula racing car - sure, it is powerful and fast, but the learning curve is hell, and sometimes you wonder if it's worth going through all of those gears just to run over to the 7-11 for a Slurpee. You'll miss that Neon more often than you think.

The last development group I was in here tried to move from FPW 2.6 to Powerbuilder. I had experience in VB and VFP, the other developer in all flavors of C. We both found the data-handling routines in PB to be a real pain. PB will tout the datawindow as the greatest thing since fresh water; it gives you complete control over what the user does with the data. It does this by forcing you to perform every data update manually. The data controls are obtuse; I spent four days creating a drop-down window class that would retrieve the record I chose and update the rest of the form. Hell, in VFP, Tom's kids can do that in about 2 minutes.

In PB, you'll need some good pre-written classes (read third-party, read $$) just to get started.

But, of course, whining from the developers isn't what killed PB in my division. What did was cost. Buying the SQL server was one thing, but upgrading every PC in the division to 32-bit OS and lots of RAM made the client balk. Also, the expertise in that technology doesn't come cheap. Here in Atlanta, trying to hire an experienced PB developer with some SQL smarts is like trying to find a needle in a haystack, and one expensive needle at that.

The basis of my programming philosophy is that you don't haul a bushel of peaches around in the back of a semi when all you need is a decent pickup truck. When I came in here and saw that we were talking about 5-10 users accessing 25,000 - 100,000 records, I convinced the powers that we weren't at the threshold of needing a major client-server architecture, just some decent design. And oh, yeah, the VFP stuff I'm giving them is ODBC based, so in the event we quadruple in size over the next six months, we can to to SQL server with our existing applications.

So, instead of a development team of 5 and 32-bit upgrades to the whole department, they have just little old me, all of their existing workstations, and the product is implemented, instead of just being a pipe dream.