Hi Walter!

SNIP
>I know for sure these arguments are believed insignificant for all those poor .NET developers.
>It seems the same story about Interitance in VB6: It was insignificant. Now .NET has it and has more OO features than VFP (?) it seems to be the most important thing (pardon me ?!?). So when in .NET version x a local database engine was introduced I can see the headlines in the papers: Local Dataengine greatly improves .NETs flexilibity!
SNIP

Good point!

>About the argument of NICE GUI's. Well most GUI's are bad because they're designed bad, not because of the limitations that come with the development tool. You can create very pretty GUIs in VFP as well. They're about rare I guess because good programmers seldom are great GUI designers...
>
>Walter,

I've asked myself many times, where is the final user of the applications in all these equations?
What the user does in the interval that pass when the app transmit data to local tier,then this convert data to XML, then transmit XML to another tier on server that pass changes to server, which returns if the update was succesful or not to the server side tier, which ...
Or for a simple query and its results that is passed many times between tiers with conversions from and to XML? He/she is watching the damn hated hourglass. Where is eficiency here?

Although I understand very well that this can be very important for scalability of the application at server side and that this is the standard for entreprise apps, I still don't like the idea to complicate things when not needed.

I currently work on a project that must work well over a slow bandwith (DSL). All data for lookup and static tables are saved locally and updated only with changes from server. Using VFP local data engine, I can do local joins and queries, local indexing and a lot of other things. Not to mention that everything that involve selecting from lookup tables are instant (incremental searching on a 40000 products list or on a 3000 customer list for example).

You can design nice GUI, I agree with that, but functionality and responsiveness is also very important.