>My current client is seriously thinking of porting his commercial VFP app to Delphi because of the speed of instantiation of the forms ie VFP is too slow on many of the PCs being used Pentiums with 64MB RAM.
>
>He accepts that VFP data engine is fast - but this app is not partic data intensive.
>
>Has anyone had any experience of how much faster Delphi form instantiation is than VFP - and what the disadvantages of Delphi are. (Apart from fact that I am a complete novice with Delphi !)

What are you actually referring to here? Speed of the application or simply the speed that the application comes up with?

If you're talking about the latter, there's no way to optimize VFP to do it anywhere neaer the speed that Delphi as a native language can do that. If you're talking about data access and displaying data I thin you'll find that proper optimization of your forms can result in good performance and VFP will make up for any form slowness issues by fast data access.

For a commercial product though there are alos issues of distribution size and installation issues of requiring support files etc. that can make a standalone app written in Delphi nice. However, if you use data this point is moot as an installation of Interbase or BDE will actually be bigger than VFP's runtime.

Lately, actually i've been using XML as my data store in other languages to ignore the whole need for a database using the XMLDOM instead as the data store for small to medium sized data sets.

+++ Rick ---