Visual Dataflex is a programming language of sorts which may be best described as belonging in the category of Visual Basic for Applications, the older style of Visual Basic and maybe even a very little bit of .Net. It's simple and good in what it does. Simple? Why! I hear you cry. Fear not, I will explain why I think this. First though, I'd like to touch on what it can do for you?
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This language sounds like it was just created to facilitate rapid creation of GUIs. Looks like its going to get a lot of competition from languages like VB and C#. With a good GUI designer, I don't see why anyone would want to use VDF.
Not all applications fit a specific framework and as the author says, once you try to do something different, you end up fighting the language.
Thanks, but I'll pass.
Only reason I don't like it is because we already have a program, that we purchased that was based around Visual Dataflex, and it's been nothing but trouble to us.
Hopefully it doesn't reflect how you can use Dataflex if used properly
Sorry for the flame, but this is total crap (I have worked with it, as a consultant a customer had it, nothing but trouble).
Does anyone know how well it runs under wine? And no I am not good enough to use mysql to replace Microsoft Access
Well, that reminds me of a company that I was working for before: they started somewhere in the 80s using a database system called ... Dataflex. They programmed everything in it, from stock management to billing to HR. Support for that version (some weird motorola UNIX or something) stopped, they ended up emulatin that on SCO, and finally emulating SCO. When I worked there a few years back the job was to emulate the whole lot on FreeBSD (it worked pretty well).
I think it was illegal to run it on any other architecture that the initial motorola minicomputer though ... and a company had been set up to collect a last bit of money through suing people who wanted to do that.
I'm developing VDF for 8 years now. The language has much more functionalities which are bescribed in the article. Like the datadictionaries. Datadictionaries are like a shell around the database. Here you can define that the datafield is capslock, required, validation procedures, ect. When you make then a Form, you just have to drag the database zones on the Form, and they all have the functionality as bescribed in the datadictionaries. Another advantage, is the web part of VDF. Webapp is a very strong tool for developing web applications, and makes also use of the datadictionaries as bescribed. No validation in the asp code is needed, it's all done in the datadictionaries.
Finally, I want to say this. I' am also an C#.net developer, so I can compare. For database applications you can't compare the two, VDF is just build for it. Who can make an application for Pervasive.SQL and without recompiling it runs on SQL Server ? Yes, VDF. And at last, when you start learning a new language, you have always difficulties to pass.
P.S. I (and my team 6 developers) have more than 500 users in about 40 different companies, with different applications (all vdf).