>Of course, that goes without saying. When needing a tool to design an application to meet business requirements where remote data is not involved VFP is still the most cost-effective and fastest means to do the job and the best for local data access by far. VFP also has a better support community for its developers.

I can guess you never really worked with VFP with remote data, i have and a lot... When you say VFP is the best for local data access, it is probably true but not with the native VFP tables. It really is great with remote data on VFP cursors.

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>However, if later you need to add web access then you have to add a separate tool like web connect. However, a separate tool is not necessary with Delphi.
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You absolutly do not need web connect to create web application in VFP. VFP has the abillity to create COM objects which can be used with ASP and ASP.NET, You can build a full blown web application using VFP alone.


>N-tier development is much simpler in Delphi unless you compare it to one of the VFP frameworks that handles n-tier development. However, once again, you have to purchase the separate framework, whereas in Delphi the n-tier development support is built-in.
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I just finished the installation of our software into a large corporation, our software is THE mission critical software they use now. It has an n-tier architechture and we did NOT use any third party framework to develop it. The buisiness logic is in COM+ and the database is SQL Server 2000. This application receives 100k's of hits a day. It was build 100% with VFP. I would never go back and develop it in something else. n-tier development support is also built-in VFP.

>Both products fail to provide sufficient reporting capabilities.
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Aggree on this but there is a lots of third-party tools we can use. I see VFP as a development language not as a report generator.