Re: Foxpro

David Siebert wrote:

>Yea I know I am the boss and I did make the rule. This person is a good
>support tech and fancies himself a programer. I am trying to get him to
>understand without saying "Because I said so" He is just so sure that he
>right and all the other programers here don't know what they are talking
>about. Oh well you have to admit that it is a nice change to see the
>management of a company telling a wannabe programer "No you will not use
>Microsofts program. You will use this opensource server instead."
>-----Original Message-----
>
Foxpro is a successor of the old DBase series.  It uses the file 
structure from DBase and Clipper.  This was a fine format, however, it 
was designed with a different era, and different uses in mind.  The 
format best fits single user systems.  The relationships are not binding 
in the same way, and the metadata is not nearly as integrated.  It did 
not support transactions the last I worked with it.  It was designed for 
putting all of the data in one table, and the relational part was bolted 
on later, and not all that cleanly.  The relation function is klunky at 
best to work with.

As for the Foxpro language, which is VERY similar to Clipper (or at 
least was in version 2.6) has a very dificult time supporting one to 
many joins, a fundamental part of normalized relational data.  Whatever 
you do, don't try to understand what it is doing in the case loops it 
generates for event handling, you will hurt your head.  This makes the 
code unmanageable and unmaintainable.

Foxpro tries to be everything.  It is a gui designer, an application 
language, and a database backend all in one package.  This can be nice 
for a small project, but as soon as it grows, and live backups and 
multiple concurrent users become an issue, it falls down.  

PostgreSQL is, on the other hand, just the data backend, but rather than 
being simply a file like Foxpro or Access, it is a service running in a 
central place to allow concurrent requests, and resolve conflicts.  You 
will still need something else to generate the front end interface and 
most of the logic.  Since this is a newbie, I highly reccomend PHP.  It 
is easy, graphical, and gets results very quickly.  It can quickly give 
a sense of accomplishment, while still being strong enough to develop 
real applications with later.  Then he can learn Java, and start the 
other applications.  Just imagine the joy of being able to program in 
any one of MANY languages, by MANY users, and get the SAME data from the 
SAME source at the SAME TIME.