John,

>With respect to the three VFP advantages that are continually trotted out as advantages:
>
>>A blazinly fast local data-engine
>
>In C/S computing, your local data sets are small, so, the fast local engine that
>can work with 100's of thousands or millions of rows is not the feather in the cap it used to be.

What about non-c/s envroments (I mean without a database server) ? Second I very much like the idea of having both large datasets in the back-end as the front end: The back-end for transaction purposes, referential integrity, security, the front end for OLAP and reporting purposes (this won't burden the database server in processing trancactions, minimizing concurrency problems). So IMO they're not mutual exclusive. As I said before in a previous conversation, replication of data is a powerfull feature (if possible in your environment).

>>A Fully OOP environment where the UI is indeed the most important one.
>
>VB 7 is going to have this. However, most OO principles can be employed anyway in VB. And, if you have liened in the way of web development, the OO benefits in UI development are moot..

As you said in this thread, we cannot wait for enhancements which are already available in other environments. As we both don't know what VFP has to offer in the next version, I don't draw conclusions on future enhancements. As for the benefits of OO in UI development I don't agree: Much of my personal framework as other commercial frameworks rely on inheritance. Without inheritance I probably would not program in VFP.

>
>>A rich data centric language including it's own DDL and DML.
>
>Again, in C/S development, this is also a moot point.

See notes above. IMO C/S and VFP specific data centric commands are not mutual exclusive.

>With all of that in mind, VFP is only decisively better when talking about single tier applications

>There are some advantages when discussing two tier applications/Client/Server applications.

>In three tier/N-Tier scenarios, the advantages are miniscule at best...

Could you explain this a bit more. I don't understand why VFP's data centric language cannot play an important role in any layer of a N-tier approach.

Walter,