Jon,

While I'm not one to discourage the use of Foxpro I am one to use the right tools for the job considering all of the requirements. Foxpro is great at highspeed access to databases and is a good platform for quickly making n-tier systems. You should consider that Foxpro has problems with printer drivers (notably Hewlett-Packard Laserjets) as well as problems with video drivers. Foxpro's internal reporting features are less than desirable (but integrate fairly well with 3rd party ones such as Crystal Reports). You are almost certainly going to find more staff (programmers, etc.) and cheaper staff when developing on VB/Access/delphi,etc. and even C/C++ in some areas. Support costs in a wide distribution package such as a generic accounting program would be high with Foxpro as well because of the problems I mentioned above as compared to a more 'generic' development environment. Foxpro may be the best mid-level database development environment but if you go broke supporting it then who cares how good it is.

From a business standpoint (general mass marketing of an application versus an internal or consulting or limited market application) I choose other development environments or a combination of those environments rather than a lone Foxpro environment. From a programming standpoint, I use Foxpro because I can write database programs SO MUCH faster and easier and cheaper. I've tried supporting a foxpro application of over 1200 installations about 3 years ago and I'm not going to try that again. For the locations that I can control or be reasonably sure of tight IT control and knowledge over the machines, then I pick Foxpro for database work.

As far as Foxpro's future ... well, we (meaning Foxpro users) haven't killed it yet. That should say something. :) Those are just my experiences and certainly can't be representative of everyone. Good luck on your hunt for a new development environment.


- A Hilton


>I am responsible for the development done by 5 programmers who are presently using MS Access. We sell general purpose commercial accounting software that is targeted at the mid-range business (a business having $500,000 to $5,000,000 sales per year).
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>We want to move from Access for a variety of reasons, one of which is the slow response time we are experiencing in a network environment. We moved to the Windows platform three years ago, but have been selling accounting software since 1981. We previously used various versions of Basic and Btrieve in the DOS environment.
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>I have been looking very seriously at FoxPro as a replacement development environment. It seems to fit in nicely with what we want to do. Our customers and our resellers are not yet ready for the client-server environment so we are looking at FoxPro as being a step up in the file-server environment.
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>However, I have been spending a lot of time browsing across the internet at sites like this one and am having second thoughts because of the ongoing discussions about the future of FoxPro. I must weigh the risks of using a development platform against the benefits since the future of our company depends on selling accounting software.
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>Maybe I should go with VB and Pervasive.SQL or try once again to be happy with Access2000 and MSDE. Please help me make up my mind by sharing some of your good advice.