>>I don't believe in free tools anymore. Too many times the free solutions were buggy, with no support and got outdated soon. That is fine if you are a >willing to cope with that or have a really tight budget, but as our company grew bigger, with more developers, we are well willing to pay for decent, well >working, well documented and supported paid alternatives. They tend to end up as cheaper solutions than the free ones, which take more time to >integrate and dealing with the headaches.
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>Such a general statement I can't agree with - Is python buggy? Is Ruby buggy? Most of the open source stuff works very well. Linux is open source and works - I use it daily. So the general statement is just wrong.
>
>IMO it does not matter what language you use. You will have to develop your framework. In Fox, few used what MS provided - they created or developed a framework that worked for them. In python I have developed a framework I use. In Lianja developers will create what they need. Yes it's true that most of the commercial guys provide many tools to get it "done" and often provide use patterns to help with the development of a personal framework. Is it cheaper in the long run - that I'm not to sure. I see WinDev, Lianja, RunRev trying to offer everything to the developers (including the kitchen sink) but does it work for your project or will you have adapt it? Could you have done the work just as fast using the basic tools (HTML, CSS, javascript, python, VB.NET).
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>I like the idea of a cross platform language - I program for it daily. But there has to be issue moving code from the web, desktops, phones, and tablets. The tech is just very different.
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>Johnf

Good points, John

Years ago, we developed several Fox apps that ran on either Windows or SCO Unix
90% of the time, there were no problems porting the code from one platform to the other, but when it came to things like printers, serial devices, screen resolutions, etc, there were lots of issues that prevented us from using some of Fox's most powerful features.
Cross platform sounds good in theory but in practice just using Windows gave us a better product, so we opted out of Unix and made them Windows only apps.