Antiquated Software

[John Esak]

> At the end of the day it comes from interoperablity. Especially
> at the database
> level.
>
> Eventually you quit fighting the good fight and give into "better
> tools" than we
> have with filePro.
>
> Ask the people again who said it was antiquated... Do they
> consider it that
> because the database is non-standard and proprietary?

At first, I thought you were going to offer something useful... then you
come up with this incredibly "leading" and thoroughly unproductive question.
To what purpose? Flame baiting, no doubt. Interoperability can and has been
built into our enterprise system with filePro at its core since 1980. Yeah,
yeah, I know, filePro can't do server side ODBC. Well, I just had a fortune
500 company tell me they couldn't tell me what invoices they were paying off
with their A/P checks... well, they could tell me the invoice numbers, but
not the amounts.... their Oracle database didn't have signifiers for that
ability. Interoperability, is what you make it, and filePro hasn't let us
down yet.

<rant>
The "antiquated", "looks-like-DOS" arguments only hold water if that is the
level of the service your programs provide... and in Linda's case, I don't
think that is so. People are lazy, and salesmen are doubly so,
mouse-clicking their way through life is the only thing they know. I'm not
surprised most of them can't set their VCR's. Yes, if they want to use an
ACT database on their laptop, and you can't integrate their contacts with
your filePro database, it would be a problem... but many companies can't do
this with similar full-blown relational databases. It is *always* a question
of the expertise of the programmers involved.

Linda, I don't use fpGI. I haven't had the need, and it doesn't offer enough
for me to switch or even add it to my system. What it would do for you is
allow the use of the mouse to access the fields on your screen, but that is
pretty much it. You can add some pictures here and there, which may have
some value to you in your business, but on the whole, it is not a standard
GUI like the Windows GUI. You can can not resize windows, nor change the
font size and shape. It will run your processing tables exactly as written,
but you would need to make major (well relatively minor, but lots of)
changes to accommodate a button look to your user-interface code and
prompts. Not hard, but time consuming.

Yes, you can mix and match fpGI users and filePro users. They will use the
same code, but show things differently on the screens.

The people who say your programs look antiquiated will not be changing their
opinions quickly, but if it is truly the mouse-ability they crave, it should
satisfy them. I think the point Walter was going to make, but didn't, was
that you would need an entirely different database than filePro to
interoperate seamlessly with the programs many people are used to using in
the Windows (and other GUI) environment that is prevalent throughout the
world. fpGI will not provide that kind of thing. Again, it is all up to how
you do the integration, regardless of how you upgrade filePro.

John