>I have to agree with you on this. I can do everything I need to do with single-tier apps and VFP (for now), but I constantly worry about falling behind the times. I've got friends in the VB world working with and talking about multi-tier apps and all the newer buzzwords and I want to be doing the same thing.


There's no reason that you cannot use VFP for multi-tier apps. The vast majority
of stuff you can do with VB can also be done in VFP. Limited event support
will be available for VFP shortly via add-on, which is one of the big
missing features.

I for one think John is oversimplifying the issues. There's much more to
VFP than the data engine. I use VFP extensively for middle tier and server
tier (4-tier apps) including messaging over Internet. For much of what
goes on there, VFP is so much easier to work with it's not even a close
contest. Part of it is OO and the ability to easily build generic and
reusable code that is simply not possible with VB (try to do type parsing
with VB at runtime sometime).

If you go with the times and plan with the technology that is coming into
being now with WinDNA and XML you're going to have a chance to make use of
VFP and still being able to be a full participant in the Windows multi-tier
platform. XML in particular makes the issue of which tool is used more
trivial than ever...


However, I do agree to a) take a look at other tools, and to b) know when
to use something other than VFP. VFP works great for many things but others
may simply be easier done in VB or VC...

My simplified version:

Use VB if you need to build stuff that needs to be distributed as components especially if no data access is involved (as is often the case in middle tier apps). ActiveX controls in particular are something that is very powerful and VFP does not support, but can be done easily in VB. COM objects is a toss up - use VFP when you need data access and you're not already using ADO or other data access mechanisms. Also use VFP if there's heavy data manipulation (strings, parsing etc).

Use VC when speed is paramount or when you need to build scalable multi-threaded
apps.

+++ Rick ---