>I was involved with a MySQL project, but it was a real dissapointment. Not only was it hard to get through all kinds of different gotchas with >MySQL, I was surprised that there are different backend implementations with different aspects to take care of. I needed some tools to manage >the MySQL database on a website but I found no way to profile the database of what VFP was sending to MySQL as I has some serious problems >in getting a realiable behaviour (updates randomly failing without knowing what the hell was going on). Spend tenths of hours to get help on the >issue, but only wasted my time. So for me, give me MSSQL over MySQL any day of the week.

As I said the the web is not completely there but it's very close. In general there are lot's of gottcha!

Your experience with MySQL sounds strange. I believe MySQL is the worlds most popular today (mostly due to the web). I don't normally use MySQL - I like Postgresql. But I have used MySQL in the past without any sort of issue as you describe. I believe you are saying that the MySQL logs were not providing information on the errors. I don't know what to say about that - except to say I haven't seen it.

My open source experience has been a life saver. It all started when I needed a way to produce PDF's and discovered ghostscript. MS had announced the end of Fox and I started looking for a different language. It wasn't to long after that I discovered Python and Dabo (written by Paul McNutt and Ed Leaf - fox people). Dabo is similar to Fox and it was off to the races. Dabo along with Python opened the flood gates to open source. I was so surprised that I could do everything I was doing in Fox (and more actually) using open source. I had complete cross platform code without me making all sorts of if statements to get it done. It wasn't long after that I moved to Linux desktop for all development.

I really didn't like the web stuff much and really attempted to avoid it. But a few years later I came across Django (written in Python). So I started using it as my web development platform. Today I have been working with Electron and Vue.js for desktops. Electron is nothing more than chrome and node.js. So it's very straight forward. Even MS is using Electron to create VS. I recently added Vue.js because again it's very straight forward - unlike Angular and React. Vue.js is my replacement for both.

So what did I gain - really I think not much! Oh don't get me wrong the programs are very pretty to look at (it's all html and css) but they don't do much over what Fox was able to do and that includes the remote stuff. That could mean that I lack imagination or what I did 20 years ago hasn't changed much. I believe it hasn't changed much. Make it look pretty, enter data, validate, save data, retrieve data, report data.

The biggest lost has been debugging. Yes Chrome is not to bad, and logs aren't that hard to work with - but it was so nice to work with one product.

One big negative has been the pace the Web changes. It seems everyday there is a new way to do the same thing. But I guess it also brings a better experience for the users.

Johnf