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Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)

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Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)

#71

Post by prionassembly »

mhd wrote: post #34

The 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…

My parents' small business had all kinds of reporting views (one would print envelopes) from their Lotus Approach database. It's been quite the downgrade to migrate to Excel from this. (Access, wherever it exists, it's just not as simple as GUI desktop DBs).

Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)

#72

Post by DebtDeflation »

mhd wrote: post #34

The 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…

> Heck, a lot of what we make way too much money with is basically "just" polishing that.

No one wants to admit it, but 80% of "Enterprise IT" revolves around "CRUD app on top of a database". The other 20% mainly revolves around either running reports off the data in that database or interfacing it with some other system. Been this way for decades.

Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)

#73

Post by nobleach »

My first dev job was working for a company that specialized in xBase apps. We had apps in dbIII, CA Clipper and FoxPro. We were working to move some of them to Visual FoxPro 2.6. One of our Clipper apps was my first experience with porting an app to Delphi. I learned how to pump data from dBase dbf files into InterBase (and then FirebirdSQL). Those systems were so interesting because they were such a far divergence from what I thought software development would be. In college C and C++ taught me about how computers work. I never was able to make the jump to actually building applications. As the years went on, that company tried to make the jump into web via Perl:DBI, then PHP/MySQL. But they never had the success. I hear they tried to use Harbor Project (a popular Clipper clone-like thing for the web). What a great time to be in the industry.

Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)

#74

Post by ryanjshaw »

teknopaul wrote: post #69
buescher wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Access is a fantastic database modeling and prototyping tool. It just doesn't pay, and there just isn't the tooling for moving Access databases to the web that you'd expect.

Agreed I always thort it wierd that M$ don't have a tool to webify Access and scale it on sqlserver with no dev effort. You could charge what you like for that: if the data got big, the company got big. Great for lock-in. I'm glad, but always surprised, they didn't do it. If they had, appifying Access data would have been an earner a few years later too IMHO. Too late now: cool kids are app natives.

Have a look at the M365 Power Platform and Microsoft Dataverse.

Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)

#75

Post by hobs »

teknopaul wrote: post #69
buescher wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Access is a fantastic database modeling and prototyping tool. It just doesn't pay, and there just isn't the tooling for moving Access databases to the web that you'd expect.

Agreed I always thort it wierd that M$ don't have a tool to webify Access and scale it on sqlserver with no dev effort. You could charge what you like for that: if the data got big, the company got big. Great for lock-in. I'm glad, but always surprised, they didn't do it. If they had, appifying Access data would have been an earner a few years later too IMHO. Too late now: cool kids are app natives.

Access does have a "Convert To SQL Server" button (though they never got the web stuff going)

Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)

#76

Post by silvershell »

postit wrote: post #35

I think there's still some space for something like fox pro and even access nowadays. Sometimes you just need to solve a problem and that doesn't need to be fancy, specially on the back office.

I remember years ago a Python project called Dabo, which was inspired by the FoxPro architecture or approach of building software. I could create desktop and web apps from the same code base, if I recall. Code still available on Github. https://github.com/dabodev/dabo

Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)

#77

Post by AdrianB1 »

FoxPro 2.x was fast and easy to use, this made it enormously popular back in the days. In mid to late 90' it was the first choice for most apps, even in small to medium companies. The success was coming from performance and ease of use.

In the 90' Turbo Pascal and FoxPro were languages that anyone could understand and use quickly without a lot of training. It made it accessible for learners with or without CS background, so I had many colleagues that knew and wrote a bit of FoxPro 2.6 for their needs - from small task automation to entire apps covering what the company IT was not able to do because it was not a priority.

Fast forward 30 years, the situation is not better, even if one would expect progress. We have hundreds of languages, the language landscape is way too fragmented. Do you want to write some code? Jim will do X, Joe will do Y and Jane will do Z and they will use different languages and everything will not be compatible and they will not understand each other's code. For data we have SQL and we have ANSI SQL which makes it partially compatible, that is great, but for general coding... no. And if you want to write a small data app you cannot just fire up FoxPro, you need to install a SQL server of sort, configure it (and that can be a small dark art in cases), get something like VS Code and write in a language that will not be SQL, but will interact also with SQL. Too complex, too complicated, too easy to give up. And if you want to explain to a non-IT person OOP and why a single line of WriteLine('Hello World') needs a class and a method and what is OO using the old story 'imagine you have animals, and some animals are mammals and mammals can inherit properties from the animals class' just to write Hello World on the screen, then we have a problem of accessibility: 'Man, I just want to write 2 words on that bloody screen!'.

So this is why FoxPro was easy to use: just fire it up and write some code, there is not much to prepare and nothing much you can break. And no dependency management, no unsafe downloads from all over the Internet, you can learn everything in a week and forget it in a year.

Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)

#78

Post by silvershell »

stockerta wrote: post #56
swiley wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are these things really better than just opening a sqlite3 database with python?

In FoxPro, heck even in Access you can easily add a GUI frontend to your DB without writing any or much code. With python... Good luck.

True. Years ago, some FoxPro developers tried to translate their experience in building apps with FoxPro to python. Check the Dabo project. It appears to be dead, though. https://github.com/dabodev/dabo

Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)

#79

Post by marwis »

buescher wrote: post #62
swiley wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are these things really better than just opening a sqlite3 database with python?

Yes. Access is a fantastic database modeling and prototyping tool. It just doesn't pay, and there just isn't the tooling for moving Access databases to the web that you'd expect.

Since 2010 you could deploy Access as a web app to Sharepoint. It probably still works.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/build-and-publish...

Also you can use Access as a frontend to any ODBC database such as Postgres.

Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)

#80

Post by mattl »

carlesfe wrote: post #15

For 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 NeXT Interface Builder.
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