>Ok Erik,
> 3 hours and 30 pages of specifications later, I'm back from the meeting.


Jeff, I was struck by a post from Paul Vlad Tatavu back in March about using Java as a front-end. It left me with the feeling that this type of architecture might be a great combination:

BACKEND - SQL
MIDDLEWARE - VFP
CLIENT - Java



Here are the posts:


>Seems like someone is using Java.

Well, the following certainly doesn't change any statistics, but I want to "answer" an other statement in this thread about "nobody is using Java for a big app" (or something like that):

I work now on an Internet/Intranet project of medium-large size and the UI is developed 100% in Java (in fact the whole client side is Java). It is aimed to thousands of users. The users are all employees of the same company (so, it will not be for the whole web), so, I can't show it.

But it is in the final stage and it seems that everything works fine. It works almost like a desktop-single-user app in terms of speed and it looks alike to the user. It is definitively faster than any similar app (from the ones I've seen) developed using HTML or DHTML. To date, Java is still the best Internet solution, IMHO. It's fast, it's completly OOP, it's easy and reliable.

I would definitively recommend it. It still has some aspects that should be polished, but, overall, I found it very powerful and certainly more powerful than any other web solution I heard of.

Vlad


>It looks like a strong tip to learn Java. After your project, would you favour Java for all UI interfaces over VFP ? or would you mix and match?
>john harriss


I believe in the right tool for the right job. I can't think of anything more powerful than Java for UI for web applications. In the mean time, like any other language/tool, Java is not for everything.

I still consider VFP the most powerful RAD tool for desktop/network database applications. As well as for A LOT of other tasks that are not database applications but involve intensive processing for large volume of data. As an example of "weird" VFP app, last year I wrote in VFP a source code converter for a C++ project (conversion from Visual Age C++ to Visual C++ MFC) and VFP performed excelent++.

To be fair, I don't believe Java can replace VFP at this moment. It cannot replace other languages as well, but... this is the VFP forum. :) Personally, I would never choose C++ or Java for a database app unless there are very strong reasons.

But as it seems that the buzz-word is "web" at this moment and that all apps must move to internet (even if there's no reason for it:)), Java has clearly a very good position and I don't see any serious competitor for Java at this moment. Almost obvious, I speak from the technical point of view. It's very possible to see Java going down in the future and some other tool gaining the market... the market is driven by marketing, not by tech reasons. :( See VFP's situation. :)

And, for your second question: yes, I believe that the best solutions mix languages/technologies at this moment. Obviously, from a certain project size up.

Vlad



It would be intersting to get an update on that project from Vlad.

Peter Robinson