Highlights:
Is there a future for VFP? In your larger shops and mainstream IT in
general, VFP is dead. Those still using it are migrating away from it as
fast as they can. Few if any IT managers are going to risk their career by
starting new development using VFP. VFP apps will be around for many years
to come, but they will continue to dwindle in numbers as they have been for
the last few years.
In the Mom and Pop shops, you will still see some VFP apps for a few years
to come, but even they are going to move away from it.
It's dead and just waiting for someone to come along and bury it :-)
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The community is making VFP better. See the VFP projects on Codeplex etc.
The community always made vfp better anyway, not so much the microsofties.
PHP has not done so bad without a corporate sponsor and VFP is way better
than it...
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The biggest problem VFP has
ever had is Microsoft. Get rid of them, and VFP could prosper. And it would
be cross-platform again. Think about it - VFP on Linux would become very
popular very fast.
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But, as has been repeated often before, it is not an option to say 'get rid
of M$'. This implies that 'we' have any power over it. The product belongs
to them, and they decide what happens to it. They are not going to release
vfp in a million years because of the code within it they want to retain
control of.
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IT managers that decide on technology because of the impact on their
career have switched in the 90ties. IT managers today are either younger
folks that replace VFP centric managers. Those usually switch to whatever
technology they learned during university/college. Older IT managers that
are still supporting VFP applications decide, in my experience, on technical
terms rather than career terms. Frequently this means to keep maintaining
existing projects in VFP and start new ones in .NET or Java.
If there's budget for a rewrite, it depends on several factors what they
choose. .NET/Java is typically choosen if the budget is sufficient for a
rewrite and managers expect to keep working for a longer period. Often it's
not a single project that is the reason not to go with VFP, rather the
possibility of having training being paid by this project. If the budget
isn't huge, the application is data bound and very inexpensive ($50-$500 a
year), the time to retirement isn't that long (10-15 years) or development
resources are expensive, managers tend to stay in FoxPro (VFP and FPD). That
seems to be the case the farther you go away from the US. My impression is
that the most active VFP communities are in Asian, Eastern European and
Spanish speaking countries.
There's alaways a problem with generalization or drawing a bigger picture
from individual incidents. However, one of my clients sold another license
of his DOS application a few weeks ago. Sometimes getting work done for a
low price is more important than a modern looking UI.
VB 6 is dead and see how VB developers refuse to accept that. ;-)
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