FoxPro, Long in the tooth but still Foxy
February 09, 2018

FoxPro, Long in the tooth but still Foxy

Peter Heinicke | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with FoxPro

We use FoxPro to support Sage Pro customers, Accountmate customers, and customers who have custom foxpro applications either built by us or by other people. Our whole organization uses FoxPro. It serves the purpose of application development, database frontend to SQL and Access, and a report generation tool. We write, develop, maintain, and support FoxPro for businesses ranging from very small to hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
  • It is very fast to access data in SQL, Access, and other ODBC languages.
  • It has a lot of great code examples available on the web for free.
  • It has a lot of wizards to aid in application development, both from Microsoft and from third parties.
  • It is a structured language, so supportable code is fairly easy to create.
  • There are still a lot of FoxPro experts available to call on if needed.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • FoxPro beats Access in several ways. It is generally faster and leads to more supportable code.
  • FoxPro loses to the programming language C in speed and flexibility. You can run C on almost any platform out there.
  • FoxPro has better report writing and screen development tools than out of the box MS SQL.
  • Java beats Foxpro for web application development and platform flexibility.
It's well suited to support existing applications and not very well suited to develop new applications especially those that would reside in the cloud. It is possible to have Foxpro frontends to Oracle, SQL, MySQL, and other databases, but it is not possible to run FoxPro apps on an Android or an iPhone.