On Sun, Oct 26, 2014 at 7:10 PM, John R. Sowden
<jsowden@americansentry.net> wrote:
> I have been a foxpro/dos programmer for my small business for about 35
> years. I use linux for all but database stuff. For db I use foxpro/dosemu.
> It looks like pg is my best bet for linux/sql. After reading an o'reilly
> book on pg (_practical postgresql_), not one word was mentioned in the
> procedural language chapter about displaying text. I write complete
> applications (in foxpro), not just queries and forms.
>
> What am I missing here? I am not interested in trying to learn C, C++,
> Java, or Perl in order to read sql databases.
I feel your pain. Being a foxpro expat myself, I understand the
simplicity of having a single environment to handle writing basic
business applications quickly and am equally bewildered as to why
rapid development platforms seemed to have fallen away.
Well, here's the bad news: for various reasons (some good, some bad)
the market has moved away from this model pretty much for good. I
used to hang on the hope that delphi would carry the torch for a while
but that ship has also sailed, sadly.
The good news is that you've come to the right place. postgres it the
only choice that will meet your requirements. Coming from foxpro it's
the only thing that is both powerful enough and not very expensive.
For the most part, the data processing you've done will drop in
cleanly and pl/pgsql will work well for that. But what about UI
design?
For my part the recommendation is going to be to jump in and learn
javascript. I'm not going to sugar coat it: it's going to suck but
with the proliferation of so many javascript frameworks and libraries
once you've got it under your belt you should be in a better place for
writing applications.
For middleware/web server development, it's a lot more complicated
situation. I happen to like node.js and think it's a good place to go
for application development writing but it's very much a personal
preference thing. I do not recommend the 'enterprise stacks' -- java,
c++, .net. Stay with the stuff that's geared towards web development
(if not node.js, php, ruby, python, perl are all reasonable choices).
merlin
