My company is now in a position to move to either Foxpro or Delphi...I
saw the title 'Delphi vs. Foxpro', but the message is unavailable. Could
someone re-post this article or share their thoughts?

-mixmastr

mixma...@ccnet.com (Mixmaster) seems to have typed:

I'll happily share my thoughts.  What do you want to do?  Each has its
strengths.

VFP is great for interactive data manipulation.  You can define, fill,
browse, and manipulate mutiple databases quickly and easily.  The data
access is mature and stable, with very little risk of data or index
corruption.  Excellent query speed, decent report writing, and fairly
powerful interface design.  It is, however, a one ton tree sloth when
it comes to full-blown app development.  Anything less than a
memory-laden Pentium will crawl painfully.  Also, it is p-code
interpreter based, so you can pull tricks like macros and application
"partitioning", again at a heavy speed cost.

Delphi is great for Windows application development.  You get powerful
RAD object-oriented development tools, with which you can create true
compiled Windows apps second to none in speed.  Database access is
built in through the Borland Database Engine and component wrappers,
while report writing is handled by ReportSmith.  The BDE has its
quirks, and ReportSmith is huge, but both can easily be replaced with
native Delphi components.  You have to be ready to work in a real
programming language, and since everything has to be compiled to run,
quick and dirty data manipulation suffers.

Personally, I use Delphi with the Apollo Rocket engine for data
access, but I do all of my table building, restructuring, indexing,
and conversion in VFP.

Hope this helps
Evan Simpson

Perhaps a better comparison would be Foxpro vs. Visual Dbase. Have
looked at both and personally like VDd.  Regarding development of
applications, nothing can match the performance of Delhpi.

I've had a pretty intimate look at both, given that I'm a FoxPro
programmer and was set to move on to VFP before I saw Delphi. My general
impression is that for a client/server system, VFP is way too bloated.
It requires huge (really, ridiculous) amounts of processing power on the
client - minimum 12 megs just for your app, not including OS. And it'll
require at least a Pentium. Your app will also needs a 3 meg .ESL
library file to run, and running multiple apps loads this file into
memory multiple times (unlike the BDE which is a set of .DLLs). And
remember, on top of all this, its an interpreted language, so its screen
paints, array handling, etc. aren't in the same league as Delphi's.

Basically, when I started using VFP, I was very disappointed, given that
FoxPro had always been such a performance leader. For a local system,
though, VFP's overhead is more palatable b/c at least you're making good
use of its great local database engine. And with a local system, the
client is expected to have some fire power because the server isn't
doing any of the database work.

-Bryan

P.S. I didn't go on about how great Delphi is b/c this message would be
too long.