Hi John,

What VFP offers is the right level of abstraction. Lianja is the only app development and deployment platform I've seen that has that right level of abstraction for me for web/mobile apps. There are things I want to be better in it. And they are getting better, in a steady fashion.

Writing 6 lines of code to use an event (as in Vue JS) just isn't my cup of tea -- and that doesn't include the code that the event fires. It's too big a stretch for my feeble mind to go from there up to UI and data event metadata defined in a UI data event metadata management tool. VFP took care of the plumbing and the wiring so we could focus on what needed to be done, instead of having to focus on what needs to be done before we do what comes before what really needs to be done.

I'm aware there are people who can roll those lines of code out without much thought, and who can see all the inter-relationships in their minds. My inabilities define my style of software development. :)

In the current Lianja build close to release, metadata can be applied to every attribute of every object in an app, automatically, from a JSON file (or any other way you want to provide it, actually). That's my kind of software development. Think about what you want, in a nice UI you've designed, and then have it used wherever it is needed, without typing.

BTW: what PhoneGap gives you on the desktop is access to things that HTML5 will provide someday -- but the trend in browsers is in fact toward SPA apps, too, so there will be convergence here also.

More power to those who can work from the nuts and bolts all the way up to space exploration. For the rest of us, well, we have to find a tool that makes up for our deficiencies. :) Or in my case, find a tool that's as close as possible, lobby for the changes I need (like the metadata API, which Barry and I hatched in 3 hours on my first night visiting in Bangkok), and then add on the tools to make it work for me.

Hank


>Hank of course you are right! But the current project has a complete infrastructure in place and that is not going to change in the next few years. I.e. database replication is there, existing desktops apps (the ones I wrote 8 years ago) are not going anywhere soon, hardware servers are there, and the client is completely paranoid about the web. Actually, I don't blame him. Also the hippa is in place too. So using owncloud, or any intra - web is really not on the table. That said, if I do this right I'll have the best of both worlds - the holy grail? I'll have an exe running html, css, javascript and I be ready to move the code to the web (that assumes that I can talk the client into doing it). I might be looking to far ahead but I think it might work. Also as I said I really want CSS. My GUI lib's have been left in the dust because of CSS.
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>I'm not sure you know I purchased Lianja. After working with it for a short period I realized that it wasn't my cup of tea. I wanted something I knew wouldn't go away because someone died or the company was purchased by M$ and then killed in a couple of years. Like you my choice was Python and that has paid off. In fact I wish I could stay with Python.
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>There is no reason that I can see at the moment that Electron can't work as a Universal Windows App - unless you know something I don't. So I'm not to worried about windows. Actually, I'm more concerned with Mac's. As far as phone-gap goes I doubt I'll have to worry about phones or tablets in the near future as the apps require lot's of keyboard action. That said, I think voice input might work!
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>Where my data is located (Azure, AWS, or Local) does not concerned me because it will still work. Of course I might have to write some sort NodeJS module to get it to work. I'll guess and say I can get that done?
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>BTW I'm looking at Vue JS thanks to it's small size and it's community. I have Vue running with Electron (someone already wrote the boilerplate) and I like what it can do. Vue does not stop me from using Bootstrap and if I need it and therefore I can support all the mobile stuff.
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>So even if the desktop world changes (becomes one with the web, or becomes one with the mobile world) I think Electron will work. The real concern is if Electron it self gets abandoned - like many other open source projects. So what do you think is Github going away?
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>Johnf