John,

Thanks for reply. I would invite you (or whoever would like tio chime in) to comment on my responses below. First let me preface by saying that I would LOVE to stay in VFP if it makes sense. I know it well and have a ton invested in my framework and applications.

My biggest concerns as a Director of Development who has to make decisions about what tools to use are these:

1 - longevity and critical mass of dev tools. This is mostly educated-guess, but important to ensure reasonable costs in finding/retaining resources

2 - cross platform support - more than critical - essential for our products - specifically - Mac/PC (and LINUX down the road?)

3 - support of a highly visual, fast, UI with lots of bells and whistles including drag-n-drop of data, sophisticated grids, 2-d animation of objects, neato active-x "style" controls, multiple forms open, etc. etc. etc. These features are important for the visually oriented industries (full of artists, writers, etc that want eye-candy) that we serve.

Now - VFP has been great for #3, was OK for #2 before they ditched the Mac version, and, as we all know, is questionable for #1. As an aside - My fondest wish is for COM (in all its forms) and Visual Studio to be avaialble for Mac and LINUX (if that is even technically possible)

HTML is great for #1 and #2 - but is absolutly awful for #3. I don't have much expereince with DHTML - can you point me to a site where I can see it in action? The more goodies the better.

JAVA seems to have "hope" at least of satisfying all three. My understanding is that it is MUCH better now than it was even a couple years ago, so 1997 experiece may not be an accurate picture.

JAVA on #1 - while still in it's infancy - with the massive proliferation across all kinds of devices and unprecedented demand for developers, you gotta say that this is in the bank.

JAVA on #2 - well - that's what it's supposed to be all about, and despite the fact that it is not perfect yet, it certainly offers an answer to a problem that MS doesn't even want to admit exists.

JAVA on #3 - well - I'm confused here. I hear reports of "great language, incredible OOP, etc" and see things like the ThinkFree Office - on the other hand, I hear reports of "not that great for UI". Speed is an issue with the VM - but no-one has given me a straight answer about JAVA performance when machine-compiled.

We are at a critical juncture and need to make some decisions pretty soon. Any wisdom I can get from anyone is much appreciated.

TIA!
Ken

>Ken
>
>My company developed its first Java frontend package in 1997. At that stage I was pro Java +++. We owned every version of every IDE from Beta stage onwards. I got regularly "boo'ed" in the MVP forum for promoting Java and criticising MS for fragmenting the language.
>
>In 2000, my company produces entirely HTML or dHTML products. No Java. We use VFP Foxisapi and increasingly we look at West-Wind. Out most recent app is a Breast Screening Application that uses VFP on the server and client-side Javascript to show images of lesions and locations.
>
>We will not be using Java on the frontend again. It took far too long to load the classes and the added benefits over HTML and Javascript quickly became erased with dHTML.
>
>Our latest app works just fine on Apple, Netscape, partly on Opera, even on Win3.11 using the "non-existent" IE5 for Win3.11 that you can download from Tucows if you want it.
>
>Conclusion: HTML and/or dHTML are cross-platform, easy, cheap. We now focus on the server and smarts there, because that is where the real value comes. We prefer to use operating system-specific tools on the server because they are faster and generally more robust. The concept of "cross-platform server" is imaginary for our clients.
>
>My advice: do cool apps using HTML and Javascript. Use something you know on the server. VFP is a good choice for the server IMHO.
>
>Regards
>
>JR