Visual FoxPro (Discontinued) vs. MuleSoft Anypoint Platform

Legacy applications already on VFP are a good candidate. If you plan to move to iOS and Android apps, VFP is not for you. Also, in future access to VFP programmers may be limited. You could use VFP as a powerful database tool. I know of many programmers who love to exploit the features of VFP to create easy to use applications.

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform is best tool in the market for developing APIs with complex structures communicating with various different types of applications including web applications as well as legacy applications. Also applications including database connectivity for fetching and updating data in the DB tables. I cant think of any scenario which MuleSoft Anypoint Platform could not be used for developing the integrations.

Incentivized

• Treat data from files
• Reporting

Incentivized

• API Manager provides easy API Policy Governance. You do not have to manage multiple platforms for managing the policies.
• Supports hybrid Mule EBS environments. You can configure both CouldHub-based and on-premise-based API using Mulesoft API manager in a similar manner.
• It's very easy to implement API proxy.
• User friendly UI.
• Single platform to manage all.

Incentivized

• Microsoft stopped selling this and stopped supporting it in 2014. It still works on Windows 10, but if you have a problem, you are on your own.
• The look and feel of screens and displayed text is getting a little dated.
• It's really designed for desktop/server environments rather than the cloud.

Incentivized

• Has more features than what we really need so we're paying for more than we use. Sort of like paying for an Abrams tank when all we really need is a Toyota Corolla.
• Not a value product, tends to be expensive.
• Takes a while for developers to learn to use Mulesoft Anypoint.

Incentivized

There are several easy to use and powerful features of VFP that programmers like.

There’s a lot of learning curve at the beginning when it comes to building the code and everything. In terms of usability, I’d say once you get used to it, it’s fine — but it’s not very easy during the initial stages.

Incentivized

Although MS has discontinued support of VFP there is a good community of programmers that are available for help. In fact we have several programmers at Apptread that are skilled not only in VFP but also .NET so that if there is a need to migrate some parts of applications to .NET , it is easy for us to do that.

Anypoint Platform support is very responsive. There is also a huge knowledge base and an active online forum where answers to most questions can be found. When needed support engages the engineering group so adequate solutions or workarounds are always provided.

Incentivized

We are only using FoxPro because it is the only way to add custom plugins into the software we use to manage our stock. FoxPro is a semi-oriented object language and should clearly not be compared with recent technologies.

Incentivized

Once we have moved all of our system integration APIs to the MuleSoft Anypoint Platform, we will need to communicate with a wide variety of external systems. All of our business and service logic is stored in the aforementioned core systems. Anypoint Platform (and all of our APIs) makes it easy to connect to various other platforms. In order to link to these many other systems, connectors and/or components are utilized, and they are simple to configure and integrate.

Incentivized

• Positive impact is that the value of FoxPro applications has continued to increase over the years, so we are in high demand for our services.
• Negative impact is that sometimes you have difficult to support scenarios where you might have to spend many hours to just keep something functional.
• A negative impact is that this language is taught in very few places, either in schools, or private learning centers.

Incentivized

• Mulesoft can be used to provide an integration platform to a large number of systems like Salesforce, ODBC, JDBC, SAP, Mongo DB, etc.
• An excellent option to develop microservices and real-time integrations.
• Not as robust in handling large data volumes, Informatica is better in that respect.

Incentivized