Mike,

Great to hear from you, Bill!

Likewise :-)

I came to the same "full speed ahead, damn the absence of corporate

acknowledgement VFP exists!" conclusion soon after VFP's demise was announced. As long as it keeps working...it's the most productive platform for me by a wide margin.

So far it does what I need it to do,

And I share what someone earlier said about having confidence that VFPx and 3rd party extensions will provide new/improved functionality and also help us deal with any glitches that may occur with Windows that affect VFP apps.

I recently discovered vDOS (vdos.info) and can't get over the joy of firing

up a Foxpro DOS application on my Windows 10 Pro 64-bit desktop!

vDOS is fast, easy to use, and it works! If anyone is curious, vDOS is

based on (fork of) DOSBox. But, according to the vDOS author, DOSBox + Foxpro DOS = data corruption due to the DOSBox authors including some network data buffering (delayed

writes.) I have a client using 6 WIN10 Pro workstations with vDOS + my

Foxpro DOS application simultaneously, and no data corruption issues so far. The users like not having to start the virtual computer, then start the app.

Thanks for the info. I do have one customer still using an ancient FPD2.6 app. I passed this info to her.

So far I'm really happy with VFP9 on Win10. I noticed last night that Win10

workstations no longer leave file handles open when my applications shut down. When the workstations were running Win7 Pro, probably half of the 50 workstations that

connected to my Linux data server would report DLL files remaining open

and active after all the VFP9 applications on the workstation were closed. Plus, the overall network management (listing of files in Windows Explorer, mapping drives, disconnecting > drives) is snappier and more reliable.

Good news. So far (2 months) my testing with Windows 10 has not hit any problems.

You mentioned VM's on Win10 to run VFP9...I found that Oracle's VirtualBox

is much slower at writing text to files, although overall the speed is fine. The best performer, for pure speed of all overall operations, is VMWare Workstation 12 Player. But, to >use in a business environment it's $150 per workstation. vDOS seems to be even slower than VirtualBox for high volume text-to-file IO, but it is very acceptable otherwise.

If things get bad enough to where we have no choice but to use VM, it would be a small price to pay (compared to a re-write in another language - God, I hate doing that!).

Mike

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I agree, Kevin...I'm a huge fan of the multi-platform support, and hope they include Android soon/someday. I've played with XOJO long enough to create a simple MariaDB server monitor that was easy to create, dependable to use, and provided a business benefit to boot. I really like the activity and enthusiasm of the XOJO community!

Thanks for your input!

Mike

Kevin Cully wrote:

I'll chime in again that I'm a fan of Xojo and a long time customer. It's great to be able to develop as we had with VFP in a singular IDE, and compile for multiple platforms. This includes using some of the same business classes for web, desktop and console.

Reasonably priced with licensing policies that we're used to.

Free to try and run, you just can't compile to an Exe/application without paying for the appropriate license.

There's some warts and shortcomings, but that's just like VFP. All I can say is "I like it" and you can quote me on that. :D

On 07/29/2016 06:54 PM, Mike Copeland wrote:

...

Just sitting here on a hot July Friday and pondering development platforms and languages.

In the past a lot of discussion has focused on Python, and there's always Ruby, etc., and I'm impressed with XOJO...what I've seen so far. Of course Microsoft is still a player, but other than Visual Foxpro, what is the current "most likely to succeed" development platform/language in this group's opinion?

Just throwing it out there...curious what the pulse is and where things seem to be going in mid-2016. Have a great weekend!

Mike Copeland

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Ted Roche wrote:

On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 6:54 PM, Mike Copeland mike@ggisoft.com wrote:

...

Just throwing it out there...curious what the pulse is and where things seem to be going in mid-2016. Have a great weekend!

JavaScript is The Next Big Thing two years ago, which means it's finally maturing and improving in compatibility (i.e., Microsoft is finally catching up.) There's a lot of cool stuff happening in this old language.

Virtual/container/boxes are all the rage, essentially chroot without the difficulties. "Those who fail to appreciate the mainframe are doomed to reinvent them."

Ruby is an updated and prettier Perl, a fun language imo. I would like to see more commandline and GUI toolkits for Ruby, like Dabo on Python.

Important to note Rails is not Ruby and Ruby not rails. Think Foundation classes vs. Visual Foxpro. The Rails 5 folks have made a pretty incredible framework, but Rails needs constant upkeep and maintenance. If you are going to build the World's Greatest Website and employ a team to continuously improve it, Rails is great. If your business model is more "build something for a client and check in with them every couple of months, upgrade every three years" Rails is NOT the system for you. It's the High-Maintenance Boy/Girlfriend of frameworks; the benefits are great, but the upkeep is a chore.

Python is an elegant language with a lot of support up and down the application spectrum, from desktop single-user to complex distributed client-server stuff.

I know Kevin's a big Xojo fan and more power to him, but I just think the proprietary model is difficult for the vendor and the developer/user to arrive at a commercial balance that works for both of them. If you pay $795 and can use it all over the world forever, the vendor can't make money supporting it. And if you have to pay $95 per year per installation, it eliminates entire classes of software solutions due to the expense. And, of course, there's always the threat that the vendor will decide to rewrite their product in Visual Pascal or J##.

Thanks, Ted! As usual, complete, thorough and well presented! :)

I agree with your assessment about virtual/container/boxes being the rage. That's kind of like the concept of paper clothing from the 60's...use once and throw away, so who cares what happens to it (except, well, fire.) After cleaning up behind several terminated employees and wondering what their home looks like (i.e. hoarders) I have to admit I wouldn't mind just wiping it all away and throwing a new workstation on the system.

Based on your info, above, I would assume that if you were to make a personal choice it would either be Javascript or Python?

Mike

Well, I remember articles in 2005/6 (when RIA and AJAX emerges) stating that the JavaScript developers would earn tremendous wages.

I've seen JavaScript and JS frameworks continuously upgrading since with, IMO, a very high level of engineering compared to the despise to this language until then.

Thierry Nivelet FoxInCloud Give your VFP app a second life in the cloud http://foxincloud.com/

Le 30/07/2016 à 19:10, Ted Roche a écrit :

JavaScript is The Next Big Thing two years ago, which means it's finally maturing and improving in compatibility (i.e., Microsoft is finally catching up.) There's a lot of cool stuff happening in this old language.

Let me chime in for Xojo again.

Behind the scenes Xojo is using Javascript frameworks. In effect they've chosen the best of breed Javascript frameworks for my benefit. The difference is that they're using this framework to communicate back to the web server where Xojo code is running. This has some benefits and some expenses as well:

Benefit: The Xojo based web application is amazingly compatible across platforms and browsers. Basically it's establishing a connected session back to the web server. It's also easy to use their framework to detect whether you're on a full browser or whether you're on a phone/tablet that needs a simpler page sent down. For us application developers, it makes it easy for us to look good for being mobile friendly.

The expense: Given the above, it does make Xojo web applications more "chatty". They communicate back to the server more than an optimized Javascript web application might.

All said, it is an amazing product that can turn desktop developers into web and mobile developers within a days time. Worth taking a look at.

Side note: for my open sourced VFP to Xojo converter, check out this link: https://bitbucket.org/kcully/vfptoxojo

-Kevin

On 07/31/2016 12:43 PM, Fernando D. Bozzo wrote:

There will be a lot of movement on top languages, depending on the application type and environment, but particulary in web languages. Some big companies are using various of them, because of this movement, and because of the rise of new ones based on old known ones. In example, Java is used a lot and keeps evolving too fast: Java 6 was the kings for various years, then came Java 7, 3 years later Java 8 (2014), this year Java 9 and Java 10 is in development. HTML 5 + Javascript 5 (now 6) + CSS 3 (and 4 any time soon) is a must: They are avolving fast too, and Nodejs is growing at light speed. I think that Nodejs is a very interesting and power language (based on JS), because allows you Javascript on client and server side, it's very scalable and will be fantastic on many environments, including IoT.

All this came with a lot of complexities, because now yo don't have "one" language for programming, testing and debugging, but 2 or more, so development is more tedious, tricky and difficult, and there are many more variables for web development. Rick Strhal surely can talk a lot about it :)

On the desktop side the movement is not that high, may be because almost everybody wants "web" apps, that at this time can interact like desktop apps with the bonus of conectivity and ease of deployment.

I'm missing the VFP calm winds. Too many languages out there and new ones every time make some caos for my taste.

2016-07-31 7:32 GMT+02:00 Edward Leafe ed@leafe.com:

...

On Jul 29, 2016, at 5:54 PM, Mike Copeland mike@ggisoft.com wrote:

...

In the past a lot of discussion has focused on Python, and there's

always Ruby, etc., and I'm impressed with XOJO...what I've seen so far. Of course Microsoft is still a player, but other than Visual Foxpro, what is the current "most likely to succeed" development platform/language in this group's opinion?

It hasn't changed much over the last few years. Python is clearly the leading language, while Java still trudges along. The only new thing would be Go, which is getting a lot of traction thanks to Google.

-- Ed Leafe

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Fernando D. Bozzo wrote:

There will be a lot of movement on top languages, depending on the application type and environment, but particulary in web languages. Some big companies are using various of them, because of this movement, and because of the rise of new ones based on old known ones. In example, Java is used a lot and keeps evolving too fast: Java 6 was the kings for various years, then came Java 7, 3 years later Java 8 (2014), this year Java 9 and Java 10 is in development. HTML 5 + Javascript 5 (now 6) + CSS 3 (and 4 any time soon) is a must: They are avolving fast too, and Nodejs is growing at light speed. I think that Nodejs is a very interesting and power language (based on JS), because allows you Javascript on client and server side, it's very scalable and will be fantastic on many environments, including IoT.

All this came with a lot of complexities, because now yo don't have "one" language for programming, testing and debugging, but 2 or more, so development is more tedious, tricky and difficult, and there are many more variables for web development. Rick Strhal surely can talk a lot about it:)

On the desktop side the movement is not that high, may be because almost everybody wants "web" apps, that at this time can interact like desktop apps with the bonus of conectivity and ease of deployment.

I'm missing the VFP calm winds. Too many languages out there and new ones every time make some caos for my taste.

Excellent feedback and observation, Fernando! Thank you very much for your input! As always it is frustrating when trying to determine where to invest your time for learning and gaining expertise.

Mike

Yeah, FoxInCloud takes away the hassle of html/ css/ JS; dev can concentrate on app more than on ever-moving technology

Thierry Nivelet http://foxincloud.com/ Give your VFP app a second life in the cloud

Le 5 août 2016 à 01:32, mbsoftwaresolutions@mbsoftwaresolutions.com a écrit :

...

On 2016-07-31 12:43, Fernando D. Bozzo wrote: There will be a lot of movement on top languages, depending on the application type and environment, but particulary in web languages. Some big companies are using various of them, because of this movement, and because of the rise of new ones based on old known ones. In example, Java is used a lot and keeps evolving too fast: Java 6 was the kings for various years, then came Java 7, 3 years later Java 8 (2014), this year Java 9 and Java 10 is in development. HTML 5 + Javascript 5 (now 6) + CSS 3 (and 4 any time soon) is a must: They are avolving fast too, and Nodejs is growing at light speed. I think that Nodejs is a very interesting and power language (based on JS), because allows you Javascript on client and server side, it's very scalable and will be fantastic on many environments, including IoT. All this came with a lot of complexities, because now yo don't have "one" language for programming, testing and debugging, but 2 or more, so development is more tedious, tricky and difficult, and there are many more variables for web development. Rick Strhal surely can talk a lot about it :) On the desktop side the movement is not that high, may be because almost everybody wants "web" apps, that at this time can interact like desktop apps with the bonus of conectivity and ease of deployment. I'm missing the VFP calm winds. Too many languages out there and new ones every time make some caos for my taste.

Perhaps he's already in the thread somewhere and I haven't seen it yet, but Thierry Nivelet can speak to FoxInCloud allowing VFP systems to run on the web without rewriting much if at all. ???

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