How your Business Concern is solved by Visual FoxPro development?
In today’s world, everything is moving so fast that nobody now looks up at old pieces of information. This is what is happening with the day-by-day changing technologies, as science and innovations are changing the face of IT all around the globe.
To be honest, we did a lot of brainstorming as to how to present you the big picture of today’s dying technology, i.e., Visual FoxPro, which was once a part of growing technologies and almost every single industry was harnessing the potential of Visual FoxPro technology.
Back in the 90s era, most developers were inclined towards application development with Visual FoxPro, with which obviously they would reach fruition very conveniently.
Let’s get started with all about Visual FoxPro technology by opening the information treasure with its definition and purpose.
Visual FoxPro Defined, along with its Purpose
VFP is a systematic, info-centric, and object-oriented computer language, plus a relational database specifically designed for RAD (Rapid application development), concentrating on data.
Now coming onto its purpose, its main operation is to provide a quick and easy way to develop large databases. However, it had been abandoned in the year 2007, but still, some businesses use FoxPro programming to keep their legacy systems running.
Also read: 101 Guide to Legacy System Modernization
That said, the existence of Visual FoxPro technology is being over-served, which shows its ‘constant popularity graph’ in this competitive market.
Features of Visual FoxPro
Developers had and still have the ease of using Visual FoxPro technology by harnessing its set of tools for creating database apps for Windows PCs and client/server environments.
Listed below are some features of Visual FoxPro technology which give it the power to run different sort of applications:
- It performs the function of the Interactive Database Manager and a good Interactive database environment
- As already mentioned, it is an object-oriented programming language
- Strong capability of developing a wide range of database solutions
- For more effective solutions, it includes an incredibly versatile reporting system.
- SQL Statements can be used in their intrinsic form.
- Ever since Visual FoxPro version 7.0 has been introduced, it supports Microsoft IntelliSense technology.
- VFP handles cursors, views, and relational structures with great power and precision.
- Quick and puissant abilities to manage remote as well as native data.
- Having an integrated database system doesn’t limit it to connect to other DB servers, namely, MySQL, Oracle, or MS SQL.
- In VFP version 9.0, a few new Rushmore Optimizations improves the performance of VFP.
Thus, Visual FoxPro technology has been delivering applications with the help of all the mentioned power-packed features.
Visual FoxPro Use Cases-Industry-wise
Here comes the important part where we will discuss how Visual FoxPro technology is still prevalent in many industries. With its significant uses, you would be amazed to know that VFP is still alive, while Microsoft already has announced the end of life.
In particular, data is of immense importance while talking about Visual FoxPro. Mentioned are a few industries and uses of Visual FoxPro technology:
1. Hospital and Medical Care
Monitoring a great deal of information is the niche of the healthcare industry. With all these data, through their VFP-based applications, they diagnose problems, operate machinery, deliver the most up-to-date information, and so forth.
The healthcare applications developed in Visual FoxPro technology help in noticing the diverted hospital patterns and trends. Additionally, apps help in decreasing the mortality rate by 40 percent by allowing paramedics to get the traumatized victims to the nearest emergency facility as quickly as feasible.
2. Retail Industry
The forte of the retail industry, in particular, is marketing. The success of the retail industry is defined by how well the strategy has been designed. For this purpose, VFP’s relational DB management system helps them track their goods’ movement proportionally with time in any particular season, plus DB helps them monitor how other variables influence those figures.
Having all these figures, retailers can develop successful marketing campaigns practically for any time and location.
3. Finance and Banking Sector
Visual FoxPro technology has been in use for a couple of decades in the finance and banking sector. Bankers use relational analytics for their data to improve their marketing, enhance transparency, and assist others in becoming more financially literate. Visual FoxPro-based applications helped many large financial companies in successfully managing the assets for their large number of consumers.
These industries and many other sectors generated good revenue using the Visual FoxPro Technology.
How Important is the App’s Migration from Visual FoxPro to .NET Framework?
Visual FoxPro version 1.0 started in the year 1991 with a strong objective to grow in the coming years, which it did so, but with the introduction of the similar product “Visual Basic and COM” and other business reasons, the popularity of Visual FoxPro development kept declining and finally, in the year 2007, it was discontinued.
Due to the discontinuation of Visual FoxPro technology, experts were either retired or moved on to other new technologies. Moreover, it was absolutely time, money, and effort consuming to update millions of lines of codes just to make it current, so Microsoft took the important step to not support it anymore in 2015.
As mentioned earlier, Visual FoxPro development is not dead yet and helping the companies to run their large and complex applications very smoothly, but doubtlessly it would vanish completely in the years to come.
Before moving onto the advantages of using the .NET framework, mentioned below are some major and common issues linked with Visual FoxPro development:
- Tough security management for VFP database
- Only one operating system supports Visual FoxPro as of now.
- Unfit to perform well on a wide range of devices, resolutions, social and other platforms.
- It is rare to find a skilled Visual FoxPro developer for maintaining, repairing, and operating VFP-based applications.
With all these drawbacks in Visual FoxPro development plus staying fresh in this competitive market, it is a pressing necessity to migrate to newer frameworks, which of course is .NET.
Listed out some cool advantages of using the .NET framework to be in a win-win situation.
- Ability to host online
- Drag-and-drop feature
- Better security governance
- Stability, scalability, and reliability
- It can either be integrated with other technologies or deployed separately.
- Good performance of .NET across all devices and platforms
Our Development and Testing Superfine Strategies are Making a Difference Globally
As stated above, most of the expert Visual FoxPro developers are either retired or moved on to other new technologies, so, many companies who rely on their sole option of running their applications are in dire need of top Visual FoxPro developers. Apptread is there for you because we bring opportunities to our global clients, as well as our developers.
We also serve in transiting the VFP projects to front-end techs.
From our experiences with top global firms, I am listing out some of the following strategies so that you can get a taste of our methodologies:
- Engage competent Visual FoxPro developers offshore with an average of 10 years of experience
- Engage the QA team offshore early in the Visual FoxPro development phase, thereby reducing defects at the early stage and time consumption
- Risks and contingencies planning
- Our QA and Visual FoxPro development team work closely with the Operations team from the early phase of development
- Special attention to mockups for end-to-end testing
- We conduct a rigorous brainstorming session to better understand the complicacy of functionality
- As per the client’s need, we engage the right technical team to carry out the project more efficiently and within the decided deadline
- Perform the Visual FoxPro development and testing actions simultaneously in sprints under Agile Methodology to come up with a bug-free quality product
- We encourage sprint deliverables to gather continuous client’s feedback to build the desired product
- Correct code implementation by having enough documentation and session recordings
- Upkeep and updating the 15+ years old codebase.
Final Thoughts
If your existing business solution is solely dependent on Visual FoxPro technology and you want to migrate to trendy and newer technologies, then it is high time to hire an expert and experienced Visual FoxPro development team. As stated above, there will be a time when Visual FoxPro technology will vanish in thin air, so it is necessary to make a move now to upgrade the solutions to keep running your business.
Apptread can bring you the best of solutions with our best-in-class Visual FoxPro Development Services and absolutely free-of-cost consultation. Get in touch with us today and enjoy the benefits of cost-effective services plus a lifetime of a professional relationship.