Rob;

I think the greatest dependency as to using an existing off the shelf program vs an in house application is budget and is based upon the political environment. The combination of VFP for the UI and additional tiers to handle data, etc., with SQL Server as a backend is a solid approach. By using a commercial application framework you will have a wining combination.

There are many questions that you have to ask yourself about any project. If there are changes in business rules, requirements changes, new reports, as well as maintenance, who will do it and at what cost? If you get an off the shelf application can it be customized and if so by whom? What about response time from the establishment of a need until it is fulfilled?

What is nice about OOP at least as far as my experience is it allows quicker creation of robust data based applications. This is due to the use of a commercial framework and the nature of OOP. At a software house where I was a programmer we figured a 3:1 difference in VB vs VFP for development time and cost. This turned out to be a very accurate number.

A well-designed OOP application can easily be modified to incorporate required changes by the simple propagation or change of a method in an appropriate object. It is like the story, the boss comes in and says, “All background colors for text boxes for telephone numbers will be Red”! You have one object to go to and create a bit of code that affects telephone text boxes. Compile and test and your job is done.

The above is a simple analogy but it happened to me more than once! If you do this in house I would suggest creating coding standards for all to follow. You want to be able to read other programmers code as well as your own, six months from now. I have worked in places where there were no standards so I introduced those that YAG suggested some years ago. Other places have required all upper case or lower case – I kid you not! At least they had a standard and everyone followed it.

With the use of standards and a commercial framework you can have one or more persons work on the application and everyone will be on the same track, well almost! It does take project management to be successful regardless if it is one person or 20 on the same project.


Tom