Luc,

Has the new IT Director shown the overall strategy s/he wishes to adopt and the reasoning for it?

What kind of work (in the general sense) does the company do?...Are there plans to get into web-type stuff?

Was the previous director replaced? If so, was it because the company was not happy with that person's delivery/style/?

Does the new IT Director code, or plan to code, in addition to "directing"? Does the new IT director have some clear bias AGAINST Microsoft?... Against VFP in particular?

Does the new IT director know that there is a VFP8 to be delivered early next year AND that some features for VFP9 have already been demonstrated? This should help against the popular "VFP has no future" that sticks like glue to us despite so much proof to the contrary.

Does the new IT Director know that VFP8 has TONS of new features designed for BOTH developer productivity and improved END-USER experience/flexibility?

The new IT Director may be thinking that the "legitimate" alternative from Microsoft is .NET and s/he may not be too happy with the state of affairs around .NET at this time. IF that is the case, then what's wrong with waiting it out, continuing with VFP in the meantime??? I take it that moving to JAVA means wholesale replacement of staff with JAVA-competent developers. Can that really be good for the company?

As regards the availability of VFP developers... that may well be a problem, but surely not an insurmountable one! Any competent programmer should be able, with some guidance and supervision, to learn VFP reasonably quickly. One person here has even described how their department (a state agency) asked interested staff to take a basic aptitude test and trained them from there.

Anyway, I wish you good luck. A Director with a "vision" can be very hard to deal with. Sometimes that's good, but more often that's bad.


>I'm currently working for Galileo Genomics inc, they just hire a new IT director that want to change all Visual FoxPro developepement to JAVA (J2EE).
>
>Did anybody ever do a business case on what would be the best programming tools to work with databases (SQL and ORACLE back-end)? Why would somebody promote JAVA over FoxPro when the entire compagny is running Microsoft product (Back Office suite, Office suite and Visual Studio).
>
>Galileo is not a Web oriented company and need to produce result fast. I really don't understand why JAVA could improve
>-Performance
>-Developement speed
>-Connectivity with Database
>-Cost
>
>The only arguments I can find against VFP is Scalability of Microsoft Back Office and availability of Visual FoxPro resource.
>
>Need any feedback on this topic...
>
>Thanks