>I'm being asked to justify the use of VFP against Oracle Developer/2000 in the development of an application. I'm familiar with the streghths of VFP (though not sure if oracle's got them as well) but I need plenty of points against Developer/2000 - very urgently.

IMO, Oracle Forms are very difficult to work with compared to VFP forms. Positioning is not done using pixel positioning. It is done using ratios based on the screen font. When developing on systems that have different fonts, the form will display but it may be skewed to one side.

Also, code is done in PL/SQL blocks. You can relate blocks together but when you do this, they seem to have a tendency to corrupt the form after some period of time. This is true in Forms 4.5 and to a lesser extent in 6i.

It is far easier and faster (IMHO) to developer applications in VFP using Oracle as the backend. As an aside, you don't even want to discuss the report writer i Oracle. While I haven't used it, I have heard horror stories about it.

Also, I would recommend getting Client-Server Applications w/h Visual FoxPro and SQL Server. While it is geared (obviously) toward SQL Server, the basic concepts of C/S applications is still the same. You simply need to translate what you see. Note: One major difference between SS and Oracle is the ability to return a result set. With SS, you can create a stored procedure with a parameter and use it as you would a parameterized view. The compiled SQL statement would use the variable to retrieve the data. With Oracle, it's not as easy. Oracle requires that you build a CURSOR object and return that obejct. The overall result is the same; however, because cursors are very slow this technique turns out to be 9x slower than simply passing the SQL statement via SQL Pass-thru (SPT).

HTH.