From the VFP portion:
Sometimes it seems like Visual FoxPro is the database that Microsoft forgets it owns. Microsoft bought FoxPro in the mid-1990s, rolled some of its performance features into the Jet engine, and then continued developing FoxPro as an independent product. But FoxPro has never benefited from the sort of full-press marketing that the company has applied to Access and SQL Server. That's a shame, because Visual FoxPro has grown into an amazingly powerful system for building database applications.
Although originally a dBASE clone, FoxPro has evolved far beyond its xBASE roots. The latest version, released in early 2003, sports a number of high-end features, including:
- Deep and consistent object orientation.
- The ability to use SQL Server, OLE DB, and ODBC data sources on a par with native FoxPro tables.
- Advanced user interface controls.
- XML support, including Web Service compatibility via the Microsoft SOAP Toolkit.
- A redistributable runtime library.
The FoxPro engine has a well-deserved reputation for speed. Coupled with the true object-orientation of the language, FoxPro is an excellent choice for dedicated desktop database developers who have performance and rapid development as their goals. But FoxPro remains a desktop, file-server database, not suited for high-volume transactional applications. (FoxPro can use SQL Server as a database, but in that case, you're using the SQL Server engine, not the FoxPro one.)
FoxPro is also the only one of the Microsoft database products to run well on Linux, using the WINE libraries—although there has been some question as to whether this is legal under the FoxPro license.
Perhaps the largest drawback of Visual FoxPro is its niche status within Microsoft. The FoxPro IDE doesn't look or work like the other Microsoft IDEs and the FoxPro language is unique. And although FoxPro does interoperate with other Microsoft products, sometimes the implementation of this interoperability lags.
If you can stake your entire career on a single database product, Visual FoxPro will fit the bill. But if you move back and forth frequently between multiple products, you may find that switching to and from FoxPro is somewhat jarring.---
If databases are your bread and butter and you pride yourself on performance and craftsmanship, invest the time to learn Visual FoxPro. You may not be able to do everything with this tool, but the things that you can do will be done superbly well.
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