On Nov 11, 2006, at 4:14 PM, norman wrote:
> As I said I follow along the list skipping some stuff and might
> have missed a change in direction.
>
> I thought the object was to end up with a VFP like environment?
> Surely, in VFP, you never have to program in the language it was
> written in?
The goal was not to replicate VFP; the goal was to create a tool for
creating desktop applications. Since Paul and I both came from VFP
and were most familiar with VFP, that certainly was an inspiration,
but not a target by any means. We hope to give developers like
ourselves who come from the world of proprietary, single-platform dev
tools an alternative that is free, open and cross-platform.
And lots of VFP has indeed been written in VFP. Powerful tools such
as the Class Browser and the Coverage Profiler are both 100% VFP code.
> If VFP is at all like Filemaker then the user can design an app
> with minimal programming skills.
Such apps are certainly possible, and almost always of limited
usefulness. They also tend to be difficult if not impossible to
maintain and expand.
I've used Filemaker, and it is more akin to Access in the Microsoft
world: very easy to put together a simple app, but very hard to scale
to an enterprise-level app. VFP is not like that at all; while it has
lots of tools and wizards and stuff to make things easier to do, non-
programmers would have a very difficult time making anything useful
with it.
We have the AppWizard that creates a functioning app with lots of
power without writing a line of code, but that's not the focus of
Dabo - that's just to get people started; to give them a taste.
> Also, some of the debate on this topic indicates one of the
> problems with open source - there are just too many different ways
> to do things. I can already here shouts of, "Well, that's a good
> thing". Let me make an analogy to show why less is sometimes more.
>
> Music, at least 'Western' music uses a very limited part of the
> sound spectrum. Yet what seems a restriction allows the creation of
> great beauty and great complexity. If everyone was free to tune
> there instrument to whatever part of the sound spectrum they chose
> there would be very little music and it would be rather simple.
> Most of all it would be rather sad as it would be an individual
> activity.
>
> Choosing a tool for RAD DB development, a tool like VPF or
> Filemaker, imposes this kind of limited spectrum. Sometimes
> (speaking for Filemaker here) one is frustrated by the limits but
> those limits, that framework does allow one to get on with the job,
Well, the same could be said of the Dabo visual tools: they limit
your possibilities, since we couldn't possibly include everything in
them, but they also make the tedious stuff simple and allow you to
focus on coding the interesting parts of the application.
-- Ed Leafe
-- http://leafe.com
-- http://dabodev.com
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