Hi,
I currently have a FoxPro 2.5 (i think) application, its
for Dos anyway, very much a legacy application, which
runs most of the day to day operations for the business,
however its begining to show its age (about 14 years
I think) and is getting a bit unreliable, to me it looks like
it's an old rust bucket of a car, bits falling off here and there,
fortunately the doors are still there and the engine still
kicks over :)
Anyway, its desparetly overdue for re-writing in preferably
a Graphical User Interface, the obvious choice Win98/NT.
I haven't the original source code so it'll be a bit of a learning
curve, though I have managed to print out the structures of
the database files so I know roughly how its constructed.
Its main jobs are invoicing, inventory, job costing and other
accounting issues. Nothing terribly complex or difficult.
The problem I'm having is I just don't know what database
to commit myself to writing this in. I currently have Visual
dBase 7.0 pro, but I haven't any experience in dBase and
there are no 3rd part support books for it yet! Although they
are apparently in the writing, I don't know if I can wait that
long.
I also have just recently bought Teach Yourself COBOL in
24 hours, which includes the Fujitsu COBOL v3 starter kit,
which is a freebie complier/editor, and not all that bad either
I might add. I think if I commit myself I should be able to write
it in COBOL, and from what I've read, COBOL still has a future
going for it. However I don't want to start a war or anything on
whether COBOL is dead or alive or has a future, just if anyone
would recommend trying to learn and write in it.
COBOL seems to default to a Text/Console interface, which I
must admit that I still do for some reason actually prefer a text
interface, but everyone now wants GUI's and point 'n' click so I
guess there isn't too much choice there, PowerCOBOL is also
included which is a GUI for COBOL, though I don't know how
good it is.
The other choice would seem to be MS Visual FoxPro, which I
also know very little about. Would FoxPro be able to import the
existing databases? Its not terribly important, seeing as the data
is purged at the end of financial year anyway, just the Product info
and Stock would have to be re-entered, which isn't too much of a
task. But it would be great if it could.
Anyway, is Visual FoxPro easy to learn? Good support, and
worth my time learning?
Any advice/ideas on this would be much appreciated,
Thanks in Advance,
Chris Lee