Users appeal to keep FoxPro alive

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Despite a concerted online effort by devoted Visual FoxPro developers, Microsoft Corp. said this month that it won’t change its plan to halt work on the venerable database programming tool.

Two Spanish developers have set up a wiki-based Web site called MasFoxPro (More FoxPro) calling for Microsoft to continue developing the database and development tool after this summer’s release of Service Pack 2 for Visual FoxPro 9. During its Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Summit in Seattle last month, Microsoft announced it would terminate development of the 23-year-old product, which it acquired a decade and a half ago.

In a statement e-mailed to Computerworld (US) earlier this month Jay Roxe, Microsoft’s group product manager for Visual Studio, said that the decision to halt development of FoxPro was considered “very carefully” and remains the only realistic scenario.

“For Microsoft to continue to evolve the FoxPro base, we would need to look at creating a 64-bit development environment, and that would involve an almost complete rewrite of the core product,” Roxe said. “As far as forming a partnership with a third party is concerned, we’ve heard from a number of large FoxPro customers that this would make it impossible for them to continue to use FoxPro since it would no longer be from an approved vendor. We felt that putting the environment into open source on CodePlex [Microsoft’s open-source site], which balances the needs of both the community and the large customers, was the best path forward.”

Disagreeing devotees

Supporters of the petition, which had generated more than 2,400 signatures, take the opposite view. Even if Microsoft keeps its promise to support FoxPro users until 2015, halting development will make it impossible for FoxPro developers to hawk their wares. Supporters also wondered why the software giant is giving up on a tool that, despite its age, remains more powerful and easier to use in many respects than Microsoft’s favored developer platform, .Net — especially when the investment for Microsoft would be minimal.

“There is still a lot of life left in FoxPro,” said Colin Keeler, director of financial systems for the South Dakota state government and an officer in the Virtual FoxPro User Group. South Dakota has used Visual FoxPro since the early 1990s to create its annual state budget. While the state now uses SQL Server for actual data storage, it still uses FoxPro as its chief front-end development platform.

“We use SQL Server for the heavy lifting but prefer FoxPro for the fine-tuning,” he said.

FoxPro is a “kickass product,” said Alec Gagne, president of JusticeTrax Inc., a small Mesa, Ariz.-based vendor that has embedded FoxPro in its namesake police department management software for nearly a decade. “A lot of things that are now finding their way into .Net for handing data, frankly, I saw a long time ago in FoxPro,” he said. “While .Net is getting significantly better at handling data in its development tools, it’s just not there yet.”

Is open source the answer?

Others are more sanguine, saying that Microsoft’s open-sourcing of FoxPro could give the resilient product its best chance for long-term survival.

“They said PowerBuilder was going to kill FoxBase back in 1994. Nobody uses PowerBuilder anymore,” said Andrew MacNeill, a Canadian FoxPro developer and evangelist. “Then they said Paradox was going to be the next big thing. But FoxPro has always been able to evolve. So this is not a death announcement by any stretch.”

Though unwelcome, Microsoft’s announcement was no surprise to many FoxPro users, who said the software has been under the ax almost from the day it was acquired by Microsoft in 1992. Originally called FoxBase when it was released by Toledo, Ohio-based Fox Software in 1984, the software started off as a clone of the dominant database of the era, dBase II.

Microsoft bought FoxBase hoping to gain a strong immediate foothold in the then-burgeoning market. It did. By 1995, DevCon 6, the FoxPro-centric trade show put on by San Diego-based trade publisher Advisor Media Inc., drew up to 3,000 attendees who came to gawk at FoxPro 3.0, the first “Visual” version put out by Microsoft.

“FoxPro bought me everything that I’ve got: my cars, my house, my dogs,” said Kevin Cully, an Atlanta developer who says he has relied on the software since the early 1990s.

Early on, Visual FoxPro nailed several key technical features. It had a mature object-oriented environment years before Java or Visual Basic 6 arrived. It can run as fast as in-memory databases for certain applications, MacNeill said.

Finally, its chameleon-like ability to serve both as a data store and as a data-minded development environment has helped it evolve for today’s Web environments. “Now it’s a great middleware piece you can team with SQL Server in a multi-tier architecture,” MacNeill said.

The perils of popularity

As dBase imploded due to mismanagement by successive owners, FoxPro’s original raison d’etre became less important, especially as Microsoft eyed the lucrative enterprise market.

But FoxPro’s use of the open .dbf file format made it impossible for Microsoft to raise prices for the software. Even today, Visual FoxPro 9.0 lists for just US$649. For no additional fee, developers can embed FoxPro in an unlimited number of their applications.

FoxPro, though wildly popular, became a burden and an opportunity cost for Microsoft. “Every time Microsoft sold a copy of FoxPro, I think Bill Gates thought about all the money they were losing from not being able to sell a copy of SQL Server,” Cully said.

Microsoft began plundering FoxPro of both its technology and its developers, incorporating them into more favored products such as Access, SQL Server, Visual Basic 6, and now .Net. Calvin Hsia, Microsoft’s lead developer for Visual FoxPro, confirmed that “a lot of what’s in SQL Server came from FoxPro technology.”

FoxPro also has technical shortcomings. Because of the .dbf format, it is more vulnerable to data corruption than true relational databases. And “from a development perspective, FoxPro-created apps don’t look as up-to-date [as others] right now,” MacNeill said.

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