Visual FoxPro (Discontinued) vs. National Instruments Vision Builder AI

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.

The perfect scenario is a production environment where items are passing in front of a camera on some type of conveyor system. Vision Builder AI can be set up to inspect those items and make decisions that can be handled down the line (rejection, sorting, etc.). It's great if you have an isolated vision system as part of a larger system that needs to just pass on results. It's not as well suited if you need that code tightly coupled with other code, such as vision-guided robotics.

Incentivized

• Treat data from files
• Reporting

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

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

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.

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

It all comes down to tradeoffs. Do you want something that is extremely flexible and full-featured or do you want something that is easy and fast to use? Sure there are things that you can't do in Vision Builder AI that you can implement in LabVIEW, however, the vast majority of the applications that we work on do not need that extra functionality so Vision Builder AI is the best choice for us. If we find out along the way that Vision Builder AI is not going to work for us at least we have all of the steps and parameters figured out that we can use when moving to LabVIEW.

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