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.