Hi John,

FWIW, Swing is supposedly much faster in the latest version of Java. Also, if Sun hasn't done so already, they are supposed to be making the UI look more like either native Windows or GTK+.

I think a lot of us are in the same boat with you. Do we learn .NET or Linux? What is the best tool for a VFP developer on Linux? I did a little bit of research, and I agree that Python is probably the closest thing to VFP in terms of the language. I'm starting to think that Java is the safest bet. Linux is picking up a lot of steam, and cross-platform is going to become increasingly important. Mono will probably yield a good development platform, but I don't know if it will be easy to create cross-platform apps with it.

On the other hand, Java feels like an enterprise development system to me, and most of our clients are small businesses. Migration from VFP would definitely be easier using .NET. Maybe Python is a better fit than those two. Then there is the whole issue of which languages provide the best opportunity for employment. There are no easy answers, I guess. For now, I'm trying to learn a little bit about everything, so I can be prepared when a move is necessary.

>I think you are aware that I have a client using Postgres as a backend and I never have trouble with that client. But at the moment I have three clients that have switched from M$ desktop to Linux. So I think I better come up with a Linux solution soon. I started out with Kylix (I even purchased it- never buy 1.0 of anything) and put a lot of work into learning and creating programs. But the code turned out to be very unstable. Trying to deploy was a nightmare. Then I took a look at Java but discovered that it was very slow using swing (I did not invest very much time). So I then started looking at the KDevelop and Glade stuff which really turned me off because it's more work than Kylix. Today I'm looking at Python. The first time I opened a python module I could read it - which to me is a big deal. But Python lacked a GUI interface (other than TK) and I dismissed it. However, I found BOA and that looks OK. But I have plenty of questions like how do I extend BOA. Why
>hasn't anybody created a framework like codemine or MM? Python sort of reminds me of VFP (lots of different terms) but I still do not understand the data access. I want to see something like a cursor. Even C++ tools had cursors.
>
>Anyway I'm lost and I'm not to sure what I'm going to do for the Linux platform. BTW I have also worked with MS C# and found that to be a lot of work for the simplest of things.
>
>John