MB Software Solutions, LLC wrote: > I would say that when you have to use a non-VFP backend, it may force > you to design a bit better. It's not a slam against VFP; it's just that > VFP lets you get away with bad designs moreso than if you had to use a > different backend. > > Your opinion?
As you imply, bad design can happen in any language/environment. "Bad" can be in the eye of the beholder, though. Much of VFP is (IMO) of questionable design (some of this being due to standards of design changing over the years and VFP doing an admirable job of retaining backwards compatibility) and/or designs not followed through completely in the implementation (not having access to the generic low-level classes, for example). This causes us developers to code things in ways that aren't as clean as they are in other languages/environments, or to code things in custom ways that make other developers scratch their heads and go "why?". VFP certainly makes it easy to create very ugly looking code, and very hard to make very clean looking code. But that really isn't a discussion on application design, and anyway it shows my bias (I love python for its clean code). In a lot of ways, VFP makes it easy to design nice desktop apps, at least the UI of those apps. It doesn't really make it easy to create true separation of user interface (view), database (model), and business rules (controller), although there's where the various frameworks come into play. Unless you have a view for web-enabling the desktop app from the design phase, there's going to be pain grafting that on in the future. Having had lots of experience with VFP web apps (using the excellent West Wind Web Connection) I'd explore using a more web-friendly, web-robust language such as Python instead, for the web app part. Of course this assumes your data backend is not in VFP, or you have the budget to "upsize" it. I mostly recommend doing web apps outside of VFP for the simple reason that setting up and maintaining a web server on a top-notch Windows machine -even Apache- is harder than running a web server on a modest Linux box. But I also really like Python (my bias again). Is the problem with your app really one of design, or of implementation? Paul _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[email protected] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
