>FYI: JVP has responded to this same message posted in the DEVX forum. For those interested http://news.devx.com/cgi-bin/dnewsweb.exe?cmd=article&group=vfp.general&item=5925&utag=
>
>Rick


Rick,
I read all the msgs on that thread. "Larry"'s final paragraphs in his final msg summed up the VFP situation.

The deja vou thing about it is that I've encountered this phenomena before. Back in the middle 80's I adopted a system based on Pick called Advanced Revelation. It was DOS based and is still more powerful than any dev tool I've used since, including VFP. During the early 90's VB came out and AR Inc. decided they needed a GUI RAD version of ARev to compete. The Compuserve news group began to take a decided downhill flavor after the first beta test of Open Insight 1.5 was released. It was the DOS version wrapped with C wrappers to create a GUI RAD from end. It was slow, buggy and missed many of the features and power of Arev, which is was supposed to emulate. But, AR spent all their money and time pushing OI and neglecting Arev, whose final version was 3.12, IIRC. OI never succeeded in the market place and it was too late to for ARev. Now, 10 years later, there are still people using ARev and there are people using Open Insight, but the numbers are too few to mention. Here is a website from 1995, which describes the problem and reflects the attitudes of developers at the time http://the-light.com/arev.html
Most of the links are now dead, which reflects the status of ARev and Open Insight.

Revelation Tech brags about 1.5 million users all over the globe http://www.revelation.com but how many of you have encountered an ARev installation? Their user conference last month boasted: "For three action packed days between August 14 through 16 2002, over 125 users and developers saw the future of Revelation Software, and they were amazed by it." Check out the PDF that describes the conference. It's a glimps into the VFP future. With few exceptions, I recognized the folks at the show. They were ARev 3rd party product vendors in special niches, or had special relationships with Cosmos or Revelation Technologies.

As for me and VFP... I will be supporting VFP apps for the next 5 to 10 years. Why? Because we only began developing many of the apps in VFP 5 only 4 years ago. They now work very well doing what we want the way we want it done. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. It would take another 3-4 years using another tool to bring the app developed by that tool to the current state of the VFP apps. That's too much expense for no return. That is a hurdle .NET will have to jump. For new web-centric apps perhaps .NET is the tool. Perhaps not. We are choosing Oracle if it is determined to be a solution for the problem at hand. But, for most data-centric apps where storage *must* be local, VFP, Oracle or something like it is mandatory. (An aside - a similar situation exists for Linux on the desktop. To merely replace Windows functionality, even though Linux is close to free, is a no-return situation. However, License 6 expenses are making the jump to the Linux desktop practical, and developing new apps to solve business problems is less expensive in Linux because of the GPL.)
JLK
(I must add that that in all of my msgs these are my opinions only and do not express Dept of Rev policy.)