>>I'm planning on a "last hurrah" for a 17 year old product that is basically FPW2.6, even though I'm using VFP9. The plan is to make one last major upgrade, bringing the app into the 21st century with a better UI. I've taken a brief look at CodeMine, MereMortals, and ProMatrix. Of the three ProMatrix seems to be the only product with something of a user community, training videos, current updates, and a free version to play around with.
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>>I am going to use a framework, that's certain. Another certainity is I need input from others.
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>>Thanks.
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>I've tinkered around with pretty much all of the known VFP frameworks and worked extensively with a few of them.
>First off - in MY opinion ProMatrix is more of a RAD tool than a framework - and personally I did not like it at all. Very odd on how it does some things - it breaks a lot of programming rules and for that matter common practice VFP rules too. If you want to write something to balance a checkbook or whatever then I suppose it would be ok - but for anything complicated I would run like hell. As I recall they had their own comboboxes that weren't even really combo boxes and a whole bunch of other oddball things - and as soon as you wanted to "step outside the box" (outside the typical framework) then you had a huge set of problems. I'm sure I will catch some static for that since there are probably some ProMatrix diehards here.

I once walked away from a job partly because they used VPM (there were more important reasons, though), which I already had on the current job. That was back in the day when VPM 5.1 was becoming a 5.2. VPM 5.x was complicated; you had to do many things the way it tells you, not the way you'd do them in bare VFP, simply to maintain its heap of metadata. And then some of these forms would crash.

I remember having to write many workarounds for trivial things, including a routine to transition 5.1 to 5.2 without loss of metadata (!). In the end, we wrote a simple framework with far fewer bells and whistles, and it was considerably faster and more flexible, and didn't have oodles of public variables.

I saw a demo of 6.0, but by then I didn't need it. It may now be very far from the FPW port that 5.1 was.

I liked VFE much better, specially since the time they broke the Codebook error of bundling presentation objects with business objects (and calling them business objects) - that'd be version 6 or 7. I wrote one app in it, and helped someone with another one, and of all the frameworks that I tried, VFE seems to be the most programmer-oriented, the class hierarchy is the most regular, i..e. easiest to find your way through it, and the metadata model is, IIRC, the community based DbcX (so it wasn't just the Feltmans who used it).