Vin

We actually moved to Java in the early pre-1.1 days and lost a lot of ground. At present most of our work is VFP but we regularly review other tools like Delphi/Kylix, open source, dotNET.

If I were forced to choose an alternative development environment tomorrow, it would be Delphi/Kylix on a purely technical basis. On a political basis for NZ I'd choose some sort of dotNET because MS is very strong here and their backing means a lot.
I see few reasons to choose Java/open source again, my customers are all hospitals that can afford licenses etc and they have all standardised on MS server and client platforms. For those who haven't, the costs are not relatively large to deploy our work.

However, if I had lots of small customers I'd be looking hard at affordable open source tools and backends. Java and open source are an extremely active, viable option in 2003.

As it is: there is no sensible business reason for our company to choose a different platform tomorrow. We'll keep evaluating. We are looking forward +++ to the next version of dotNET, for example.

Regards

JR