A ramble on Visual FoxPro (III.)

Comparison of Visual FoxPro with other development tools

This is really a silly topic, the choice of development tools is entirely due to the tasks faced by programmers and personal preferences decided. As long as the tools you choose are qualified for the project you are engaged in, as long as you have sufficient knowledge of the development tools to cope with the changeable, complex work, as long as the tool continues to upgrade, you have no reason to replace the tool, there is no need to get involved in this boring discussion.

Any tool has its advantages and weaknesses, product positioning is different, each programmer feel that their choice is the best, others are stupid. The following discussion is just boring the author of the boring speech, you can not see the big sweep.

To talk about visual FoxPro, we must pay attention to the question of what visual FoxPro is for. Undoubtedly, it is a development tool for database systems. I personally believe that Visual FoxPro is the best product for developing database applications in all of Microsoft's development tools so far. We must acknowledge the fact that, from the outset, Visual FoxPro was designed to work with data, which is fast, powerful, and very flexible.

There are a lot of people who like to compare access to visual FoxPro, and I'm always dismissive of it, and let's take a look at Microsoft's comments! Microsoft's words are as follows: "Microsoft Access is the database in Office, and is the most widely used and easiest to learn database tool in software sold by Microsoft." If you're a novice in the database, if you want to use Microsoft Office to build your application, or if you want a fairly handy interactive product, choose Access. Visual FoxPro is a powerful RAD tool for building relational database applications. If you are a database developer who can build a relational database application and you want speed and functionality to reach the limit, select Visual FoxPro. (After Visual FoxPro quit Visual Studio this year, Microsoft repeated it again, emphasizing that visual FoxPro is a developer tool for professional developers, rather than an office platform for ordinary users like access.) ）

In my experience, the MDB database for access applies to 200,000 data/table applications (its only advantage over the Visual FoxPro database is that all of the database components are in the same MDB file, and Fox's database may be composed of multiple files, which is messy). And the amount of data added, it's not that access can't handle it, it's inefficient--queries, indexes are slow. Visual FoxPro can handle millions or even millions of data, this is a practical basis, in the past more than 20 years, especially in the large-scale network database is not civilians in the era, the industry is relying on DBF data tables to manage data, no exaggeration of Visual FoxPro is able to safely, A professional tool that efficiently handles large amounts of data.

There are many people take Visual FoxPro and VB, Delphi or even VC + + do comparison, this is very naïve, the latter three are programming languages, and Visual FoxPro is a database system development tools, natural division of labor is different.

I have heard of this allusion: Foxmail was originally written with Visual FoxPro (so called Foxmail), and later used to write Delphi. If this is the case, the Visual FoxPro is a database development tool that is reluctant to write mail client software, and even if it succeeds, it won't be very efficient, but if it's a management system written in Visual FoxPro that requires mail functionality, visual FoxPro can do very well.

As a database development tool, Visual FoxPro provides us with a robust, efficient data engine that is large, fast, flexible, and robust, so developing a Single-user database with Visual FoxPro is definitely more efficient than all other software--there was a mockery of VB processing 5, 60,000 records on the ground, but our Visual FoxPro processing Millions records are also not laborious, so Visual FoxPro developers at any time to play the Visual FoxPro of the power of the data engine in order to remain invincible. VC + + is very bad, but really good use of it is not easy, development efficiency is not high. If you use VC + + development applications like VB will only use the control, then or do not use VC + + (this is called trickery), and also the Visual FoxPro itself is VC + + written, is the most outstanding programmer wisdom of the crystallization, why have the VC + + It also takes energy to write visual FoxPro, which in itself explains the problem.

And someone put the Power builder out with Visual FoxPro For comparison, everyone is a database application development environment, as if the PB than Visual FoxPro severe. As far as the development of database system is concerned, visial FoxPro can develop Single-user system, file server system in network environment, client server system, Web server, COM component of data processing, web Service, so that in addition to the Web interface can not be developed, All the development areas related to database systems are well supported by Visual FoxPro. PB's starting point in the client server system, can also be very beautiful to complete the work, this choice is all based on personal preferences; In addition, the cost of PB is very high. As far as I know its price is very expensive (some people jokingly say that PB is the world's top 500 to use the product), and Visual FoxPro only to sell thousands of yuan. Of course, this point of view you can not accept--in China software is worthless, only sell 5 yuan per sheet, and PB development way is different, use him later to change to learn other will be more difficult; Finally, 10,000 steps, you want to change the programming tools, I do not agree to switch to PB, Because the PB is also a database development tool, from the above speaking and Visual FoxPro is a level of things, you want to transform tools must have more requirements, I think using C # or Delphi will be a better choice.

All these languages compare with Visual FoxPro, the biggest difference is: Visual FoxPro is the perfect combination of programming language and DBMS, while VC + +, Delphi, Vb, PB are only programming tools, not DBMS. Visual FoxPro This characteristic, decided it is more suitable with any type of enterprises and institutions, I can not imagine-for simple query also to use VC + +, Delphi, Vb, PB to write an EXE file, use command Window how good!

Another people to the network database such as Oracle, SQL Server and Visual FoxPro, said the Visual FoxPro a chase, this kind of person is really silly, you can be cynical to him. The role of large database and desktop database in system development is different, and the two are complementary. Instead of arguing about the pros and cons, we should focus on "how to make the best use of both database engines". This kind of argument is like commenting on the beauty of a man or a woman--meaningless.