Malcolm,

I interact directly with hundreds of VFP developers annually at conferences, user groups, and of course online. I estimate that the proportion of these developers who wish FoxPro to become as RAD-ish as you describe is 5 percent or less.

For further evidence of this, consider that VFP is probably the most open product imaginable for extension by wizards and builders, not to mention its fully documented and stable and native metadata structures. Creating an application development wrapper/venir for FoxPro to do exactly as you describe could not be easier in any other environment. VFP also has possibly the most competitive third-party framework market in the known universe. Yet none of these framework vendors has chosen to take their offerings as deep in this direction as you would like. The reason is simply that there is very little demand for this type of development in the VFP community at large.

Why? Because the sort of RAD you describe is really useful for beginners doing simple, predictable sorts of applications. There is very little market for this. Moreover when you use such development systems, and need to extend beyond their basic assumptive limitations, you are deep in doo-doo. I've seen this many times: you can create a shell with standard functionality easily enough, but when you try to create extensions that deliver some sort of real competitive advantage for stakeholders, it's really tough, sometimes impossible.

Moreover the view of RAD you describe is twisted and false. Pure snake oil. For the modern definition of RAD, the wholistic view, and in my opinion the correct software engineering view, see the great book Rapid Development by Steve McConnell. His view of "Rapid Development" is all about controlling and reducing schedule risk ( http://www.construx.com/doc/chk30.htm ), not generating code which is the the simplistic utilitarian view that naturally leads to the products in the 4GL space.

As for the statement "using a framework just dont cut it", it's difficult imagining anyone saying this and also having any understanding of software engineering. Your assertion of the weight of technical specs as a basis for selecting development software is unbelievable.

**--** Steve



>Sadly we, as developers and MS customers, appear to have dropped the ball. While many people here appear to be divided over whether VFP is marketed enough by MS, I would have liked to have seen far more improvements than the lacklustre efforts over the last 6 years. If you look at the MS product range, there is no real RAD development tool. When MS took up Fox, there was some discussion that it would be targeted as the main contender in the 4GL market, and improved accordingly. That never happened. If you look at the technical specs of PowerBuilder, Magic, WinDev, Clarion, Omnis they all blow away every product, including VFP. Even dBase, now a minority development tool, is now vastly superior to VFP in most areas. And before someone says it, using a framework just dont cut it!
>
>Malc
>who is just dashing off to buy an asbestos suit :)