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Comments on VFP Awareness Editorial

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Here's a note from David Dee on my recent editorial in FPA about increasing VFP Awareness. Please add comments
 
 From: David W. Dee [mailto:dwdcatalyst@ij.net]
Subject: VFP Awareness

I just read your comments about perceptions of VFP as a development environment.  It's something  that concerns a lot of people who've spent (years) using it and developing skills.
 
The direction that Catalyst Consulting has been taking is that VFP doesn't offer many advantages   when it comes to WWW development.  However, in a enterprise environment using Citrix and something   like HP's new blade-servers, VFP is absolutely perfect.  Citrix provides connectivity at a distance, while
the new blade-servers (and their competitors) essentially offer a WAN\LAN computing environment where   VFP excels.
 
Besides it's overall excellence as an object-oriented development environment, the VFP database engine   can run on each client node - potentially decreasing the load on central server resources by doing more of the database work at each node.
 
For these reasons we think that a mix of VFP on the client-nodes as well as a hefty central SQL Server database may be the best (certainly the most underrated) enterprise development environment out there.   "Client footprint" really depends on what resource you're trying to optimize - if the real bottleneck is throughput to SQL Server, then VFP has the capability to minimize that footprint.
 
I really think that the VFP community would do well to try and make contact with Citrix and maybe HP and   other hardware vendors out there who are starting to offer alternatives to the HTTP:\WWW low-bandwidth world   that we've been stuck in for so long.
 
I'd be glad to hear any reply or thoughts you might have along these lines.
 
Best Regards,

David Dee
Catalyst Consulting
 

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