>Hi everyone.
>
>In my free time <g> I use to be a professor at the local university. This year we are giving to students a course intitled "Client-Server Software Development", an optative course of IT Engineering career. We have sixty students, averaged 24 y.o. Several of them asked me about the possibility to learn Visual Foxpro. In fact, the course is biased: 50% wants Delphi, others wants FoxPro. As course responsable, I cannot have biased opinions, in spite the fact I have ten years with Fox products and they give me plenty of satisfactions. Of course, I want to teach VFP, but for instance my support staff develops in Delphi, so we have a little problem. The students are now looking for a wider point of view prior to make a decision. This decision could affect their professional performance as well, provided they will finish the career next year.
>
>Any ideas? Any URL with interesting information about comparisons with other front end development tools? Ant ethical implicancies in this matter? Any thoughts about experiencies with Delphi when compared to VFP? Any information about Borland's future?
>
>TIA
>Carlos

Carlos;

There are “flavors” of client/server. What back end will you use? If you use VFP’s database, you could argue it is not really client/server. That is splitting hairs I know but VFP’s database behaves differently than say SQL Server. One definition of client/server requires all processing to be done on the backend. With stored procedures SQL Server meets that requirement. VFP’s database does not behave the same way.

So to me it would seem you are dealing with “front end” development and then the question of which backend to use is another matter.

You might consider an overview of client/server using either or both tools and discussing the different databases and requirements. It may be beyond the scope of one class to cover all these subjects to any degree. You can give the students enough information to at least give them a good overview.

Tom