One point to make with all of this is that web functionality should be a more integral part of the base VFP product, like all other commercial development languages! The fact that somebody would need to justify purchasing a separate web add-on for a VFP web project sometimes kills it right there! The other point is that, in reality, the support for these vfp web add-ons is no better than the free support I provide here on the UT. I was consulting many years ago with wwc and asked questions on the support board that were never answered and I've seen many with the same problem. I think that the guarantee of support is actually an extra consulting fee that must be paid, otherwise it's hit or miss with the message board...
>Rick,
>With all your comments I agree. Having said that, there are some notes I'd like to make. Any company that sells software should at least be aware of them, although there's not much that an individual company can do to tackle them.
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>1) $1000 may be 2-5 days work for U.S. citizens, it may be a year's income or even more for those of us in countries like India. Perhaps another way of pricing this kind of products will develop in a near future. Such an other way of pricing products may also be an effective means of protecting U.S. developers from products developed by those who live in low-cost countries like India.
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>2) At times there are freeware products that outperform commercial products on every aspect. An example, at least for me, is InnoSetup versus Installshield. My relationship to the latter is not one of love-and-hate, no, it's only one of hate. Most of us have had similar experiences and when searching for a new tool for a new type of job will evaluate both commercial and freeware products, of course hoping that a free product outperforms every commercial product, like InnoSetup does in my eyes. Also important are the hints that others give. After having evaluated the various products a choice will be made. Price is then one of the factors and for some of us $1000 will amply be a problem, whereas for others it is a major factor, simply because they cannot afford it.
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>3) If one tool could do it all, okay... But look at all the tools that are on the market and that all do an appeal to some wish. If I bought all those tools today, I'd not spend $1000, but $10.000 or even more. And they'd be obsolete next year.
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>>I want to throw in a few comments on pricing as a developer of one of the tools mentioned here (West Wind Web Connection).
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>>First I think price of anything under $1000 is negliable in any sort of development project of any size. If you can get a free product and it saves you $1000 but it sucks while the $1000 product actually does the job, are you really ahead of the game? (and I'm not saying the the free product discussed here (ActiveVFP) sucks - so don't start! <g>)
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>>If you are buying a product for serious development you presumably also want good documentation, support and continued upkeep of the software including bug fixes and upgrades etc. While this could happen with free products there's much less incentive to do so. ANything put out for free needs to recover the time and effort in other ways - usually overpriced consulting services.
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>>With a free product there's also isn't any accountability realistically. If something goes wrong and it's not immediately fixable - so what, you didn't pay me anything right?
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>>With price comes at least some amount of accountability and also continued incentive to improve the product and serve your customers.
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>>I've done both - I've built countless tools that I've given out for free to the community. But ultimately these tools get put out and then not necessarily improved or updated on a regular basis, because after all there's not much incentive in that. Building tools is more than just throwing something out as is - it also means packaging the stuff up so it installs easy, building usable documentation and afterwards having the infrastructure in place to support a product. All of these things go beyond just 'building it' too.
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>>You bet there's plenty incentive in the fact that the time that gets into a commercial product comes back in terms of revenue.
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>>As it is I think most of the VFP developer tools available are vastly underpriced for the value that goes into them. Think about tools like frameworks (Mere Mortals, FoxExpress, MaxFrame etc.) that save you countless hours of development time - yet these products cost around $500-700 dollars. Think about a number of the Web frameworks. What is the real value of these products and the time and effort they do save you?
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>>Developer tools aren't quite as commoditized as end user desktop applications because they are helping you do your job as a developer for which you as a developer get paid (in most cases).
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>>Ultimately what matters in products is how well they work, how easy it is to pick up (and this is actually a very important one, one that more often than not will make a sale!), how well it is documented and supported... As sad as it sounds architecture generally takes second place and comes as an after thought...
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>>Price is usually a decision that should be left as a tie breaker.