There’s still software out there today that uses FoxPro for data storage.
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Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)
41–50 of 108 posts
Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)
#42The whole xBase universe is quite fascinating. It might not have been as revolutionary as spreadsheets, but having databases on your homecomputer/PC covers a lot of use cases for regular people and small businesses. Heck, a lot of what we make way too much money with is basically "just" polishing that. (Or trying to sell you pills while you use that, but let's not digress) And dBase and its variants/rivals had that p…
> Bad acquisitions were another one, with Borland buying dBase and Microsoft buying FoxBase Amen. Add also Nantucket (Clipper) being acquired by CA (Computer Associates) which pretty much killed Clipper.
Quick shoutout to xHarbour and Harbour - the open-source, commercially-supported versions of Clipper. https://github.com/harbour/core
The projects are still going strong and many years ago I had ported a huge Clipper project into Harbour and had it working well across a 20 node network with both Clipper and Harbour binaries working simultaneously on the same database.
These days every time I make another web application I wish for the simplicity of xBase. But there is some core truth about application development hidden there that is lost to me now.
Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)
#43Foxpro had an embedded db engine and so SQL commands could be used directly in the language for fetching data, which made it fantastic for CRUD database apps, which is what nearly all applications were back in those days. The 'tables' we're just dos files that could sit on a network drive to make the application multi-user. I think there was some limitation with the SQL, e.g. no outer joins, but it was still very han…
It was flexible too - my all-time favourite application of FoxPro is Island ECN, one of the first big Alternative Trading Systems and a direct ancestor to NASDAQs current INET platform. The matching engine was written in FoxPro for DOS! --- the source code is here-> http://josh.com/notes/island-ecn-10th-birthday/
Nice! Reading that code brings back memories... 1990 (around) I did a lot of work in dBase & Clipper & fox pro; it was easy to work with and, because in the Netherlands it was not that popular, I could get excellent job as 16-17 year old for the summer, working on admin systems for factories that used dbase & clipper.
I remember porting some of those systems to Java half a decade later and asking myself if this was a good direction; Java looked so... crude at the time compared to these technologies.
Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)
#44Ah, the xBase days.
I wrote a couple of Clipper applications back then, started with Summer '87, enjoyed the OOP improvements on 5, but then they blew it with Visual Objects on Windows, leaving FoxPro as the only xBase clone around for a while.
Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)
#45Foxpro had an embedded db engine and so SQL commands could be used directly in the language for fetching data, which made it fantastic for CRUD database apps, which is what nearly all applications were back in those days. The 'tables' we're just dos files that could sit on a network drive to make the application multi-user. I think there was some limitation with the SQL, e.g. no outer joins, but it was still very han…
C # creator Anders Hejlsberg made a statement a few years after the .net platform came into being, recognizing that data was very important and admitting that they were developing linq.
It would be interesting to get that statement, because .NET original plan was to be what WinRT is.
A improvement over the COM runtime with better tooling, but then they pivoted the idea with J++, and had to reboot it with .NET for the reasons we all know.
https://msdnshared.blob.core.windows.net/media/MSDNBlogsFS/p...
Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)
#46The whole xBase universe is quite fascinating. It might not have been as revolutionary as spreadsheets, but having databases on your homecomputer/PC covers a lot of use cases for regular people and small businesses. Heck, a lot of what we make way too much money with is basically "just" polishing that. (Or trying to sell you pills while you use that, but let's not digress) And dBase and its variants/rivals had that p…
> Bad acquisitions were another one, with Borland buying dBase and Microsoft buying FoxBase Amen. Add also Nantucket (Clipper) being acquired by CA (Computer Associates) which pretty much killed Clipper.
Yep, Visual Object had nothing to do with Clipper experience.
Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)
#47The whole xBase universe is quite fascinating. It might not have been as revolutionary as spreadsheets, but having databases on your homecomputer/PC covers a lot of use cases for regular people and small businesses. Heck, a lot of what we make way too much money with is basically "just" polishing that. (Or trying to sell you pills while you use that, but let's not digress) And dBase and its variants/rivals had that p…
> The whole xBase/Clipper-verse almost seems like a unique dead end, in an industry that keeps pretty much every other technology afloat.
Interestingly Claris's FileMaker is still in business: https://www.claris.com/filemaker/pro/
And of course many editions of MS Office include Microsoft Access, which undoubtedly had a role to play in killing dBase, Borland’s Paradox, and Lotus’s Approach.
Access’s not quite as pervasive as Excel but I'm sure a bunch of VBA die-hards in various industries still use it, at least for prototyping.
Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)
#48FoxPro 2.x was absolutely amazing. Incredibly fast, easy to develop with once you understood how it worked. And portable - 2.5 had a version that ran on SCO Unix.
Also excellent built-in documentation, complete with samples and F1 context help. I pretty much learned FoxPro from scratch entirely from it.
how did we go from excellent software, with excellent documentation, that made regular people implement solutions, to the current situation?
Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)
#49For those curious about Foxpro, I found this link which contains a tutorial with screenshots on how to use it. Worth it just for the very nostalgic Windows 3.1 controls. http://www.dfpug.de/loseblattsammlung%5Cmigration%5Cwhitepap...
Looks like awesome technology, looks like it's easy to build simple CRUD apps without the need for the overhead of webapps
Thats exactly what it was all about! You basically made a database, attached a frontend with some forms etc. and you were good to go!
Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)
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