>>
>>Mike, I appreciate your points but reserve right to stay on my owns. The major concern here is that 'in the long run' statement looks really suspicious these times. I mean that having new version patch every 6 month, new version every year, and new language every few years, it's painfully difficult to make long-run stakes.
>
>Ed,
>I agree with you. For the most applications I do, frameworks are a nuisance. And what I have seen of the commercial ones they have so much over head checking 100 things for every conceivable circumstance that their proformance suffers greatly. If I want something to run slow I can use Access or Oracle. I use Foxpro for the speed an flexibility.
>
>Robert
Robert and Ed,

VFP is not our father's xBase. VFP is a fully object oreinted development environment and as such there is a lot of object management that is required behind the scenes. The job of a framework is to manage those things. To manage interobject communications, forms, menus, toolbars, etc. In order to do this they usually give us classes we can use to build those things.

Arguing that a framework requires overhead is like saying that if I write a line of code it has to be executed. If I write an aplpication that does not handle the interobject communications, or that severely limtis the possiblities of that communication, then I get what what I wrote, a severely limited application.

Users are becoming more demanding on the systems we give them. They expect that they can do what they want with the applications and that they will not be restricted. The days of getting away with modal systems with limitations of the user interface are going away.

A well designed framework will provide the background managment facilities without requiring the use of any specialized overhead, other than that required for the functionality.

The truth is that we will either use a framework or we will build one, or we will reprogram that functionality for every application we ever write. The decision to build a framework or buy one is really a decision of where we chose to spend our time, is writing applications or writing a framework.

I had the luxury of having been hired by a consulting firm to write a framework for them, so I got padi for it. Most developers will not get paid for writing a framework, that effort will be unbillable time spent. Yes it pays back over time,but so does the cost and time involved in buying and lerning a commercial framework (and that is invariably less time and money than building your own).