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The whole xBase universe is quite fascinating. It might not have been as revolutionary as spreadsheets, but having databases on your homecomputer/PC covers a lo
by mhd 6y ago
The whole xBase universe is quite fascinating. It might not have been as revolutionary as spreadsheets, but having databases on your homecomputer/PC covers a lot of use cases for regular people and small businesses. Heck, a lot of what we make way too much money with is basically "just" polishing that. (Or trying to sell you pills while you use that, but let's not digress)
And dBase and its variants/rivals had that pretty much covered, from CP/M to Ataris to DOS and later Windows. Also begat a wide spectrum of programming it, from simple end-user customization to pretty large multi-person applications.
But now? The whole xBase/Clipper-verse almost seems like a unique dead end, in an industry that keeps pretty much every other technology afloat. And it doesn't even seem that that is purely for technical reasons. Sure, client/server and more powerful machiens meant that "proper" RDBMS were getting common, and with environments like Visual Basic or Delphi you could create some pretty neat frontends.
But that was only part of it. Bad acquisitions were another one, with Borland buying dBase and Microsoft buying FoxBase. Not before the dBase makers were a bit too litigious, which doesn't really help trust in the market and individual products.
Right now, the most prominent products still somewhat in line with that would be Access and FileMaker, and they seem slightly different beasts. Or maybe even cloud-based data buckets like Firebase, but they don't quite seem as "egalitarian". And while NoSQL database might claim some relationship, their usage patterns are quite different.
- teh_klev 6y ago> Bad acquisitions were another one, with Borland buying dBase and Microsoft buying FoxBase Amen. Add also Nantucket (Clipper) being acquired by CA (Computer Associates) which pretty much killed Clipper.
- jasim 6y agoQuick shoutout to xHarbour and Harbour - the open-source, commercially-supported versions of Clipper. https://github.com/harbour/core https://github.com/harbour/core The projects are still going strong and many years ago I had ported a huge Clipper project into Harbour and had it working well across a 20 node network with both Clipper and Harbour binaries working simultaneously on the same database. These days every time I make another web application I wish for the simplicity of xBase. But there is some core truth about application development hidden there that is lost to me now.
- teh_klev 6y agoThanks for posting. I was a Clipper app developer in the 80's and early 90's, and seeing my old friends TBColumn() and TBrowse() just gave me a rush of nostalgia :)
- pjmlp 6y agoYep, Visual Object had nothing to do with Clipper experience.
- signal11 6y ago> The whole xBase/Clipper-verse almost seems like a unique dead end, in an industry that keeps pretty much every other technology afloat. Interestingly Claris's FileMaker is still in business: https://www.claris.com/filemaker/pro/ https://www.claris.com/filemaker/pro/ And of course many editions of MS Office include Microsoft Access, which undoubtedly had a role to play in killing dBase, Borland’s Paradox, and Lotus’s Approach. Access’s not quite as pervasive as Excel but I'm sure a bunch of VBA die-hards in various industries still use it, at least for prototyping.
- swiley 6y agoAre these things really better than just opening a sqlite3 database with python?
- stockerta 6y agoIn FoxPro, heck even in Access you can easily add a GUI frontend to your DB without writing any or much code. With python... Good luck.
- silvershell 6y agoTrue. Years ago, some FoxPro developers tried to translate their experience in building apps with FoxPro to python. Check the Dabo project. It appears to be dead, though. https://github.com/dabodev/dabo https://github.com/dabodev/dabo
- buescher 6y agoYes. Access is a fantastic database modeling and prototyping tool. It just doesn't pay, and there just isn't the tooling for moving Access databases to the web that you'd expect.
- teknopaul 6y agoAgreed I always thort it wierd that M$ don't have a tool to webify Access and scale it on sqlserver with no dev effort. You could charge what you like for that: if the data got big, the company got big. Great for lock-in. I'm glad, but always surprised, they didn't do it. If they had, appifying Access data would have been an earner a few years later too IMHO. Too late now: cool kids are app natives.
- prionassembly 6y agoMy parents' small business had all kinds of reporting views (one would print envelopes) from their Lotus Approach database. It's been quite the downgrade to migrate to Excel from this. (Access, wherever it exists, it's just not as simple as GUI desktop DBs).
- DebtDeflation 6y ago> Heck, a lot of what we make way too much money with is basically "just" polishing that. No one wants to admit it, but 80% of "Enterprise IT" revolves around "CRUD app on top of a database". The other 20% mainly revolves around either running reports off the data in that database or interfacing it with some other system. Been this way for decades.
- cryptos 6y agoMaybe it is is "CRUD" in practice, but often it shouldn't. There ist way too much business software with ugly hacks like misused data fields, endless data repetition, manual steps and the like. That might be "good enough" in many cases, but it comes with risk and high costs. Software supporting actual business processes using "domain objects" would be way better.