Re: Visual FoxPro (VFP) 9 Migration Strategy to Postgresql on Linux

On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 12:33 PM, Kevin Salisbury
<KSalisbury(at)twinman(dot)com> wrote:
>
> Merlin,
>
> Thank you for the detailed response! Yes, we have started along the lines you describe;
>
> HTML 5/CSS based CMS system - We believe we will need a strong CMS to manage all the HTML/CSS that will be in this project. There appear to be dozens of capable open source PHP CMS systems - concrete 5 is the one we like the best so far. http://www.concrete5.org/ . It's biggest downfall is that it is tied to mysql. However, when you say, "On the web side, I would tend to avoid all technologies that employ scaffolding, or auto-generation, of either the html or the sql." are you saying you would rather avoid using a PHP CMS like concrete 5?

yeah, basically. I prefer to make the mindspace investments on the
client side (that is, the browser). There are so many good javascript
libraries out there that you can utilize and html frameworks tend to
be (and understand there are HUGE exceptions to this generalization) a
way to avoid taking the full html5/css plunge. They're just too high
level for me. Of course this depends a lot on the type of site you're
trying to make -- if it's more of a classic publishing site then a CMS
makes a lot of sense. But if you're making a highly interactive
application type site then you should be looking here:
http://code.google.com/apis/ajax/playground/?type=visualization here:
http://jqueryui.com/ and here: http://jquery.com/ .

> Reporting/Business Intelligence - Yes, we like Pentaho as well. We're looking at the entire Pentaho BI http://community.pentaho.com/ and perhaps combined with R http://www.prashantraju.com/2010/01/pentaho-and-the-r-project/ . We have not looked closely at Jaspersoft Community offerings http://jasperforge.org/ but if is on the schedule to do so.  Like CMS, we like the idea of a open BI framework to save some development time and for project support purposes.

Yeah Pentaho is good stuff but I tend to have very mixed feelings
about Java generally in terms of an application development stack.
It's a systems programming language at heart and poorly suited to
general application development. That hasn't stopped gazillions of
developers from going that route and it's very easy to jump into the
java world with both feet, but be very skeptical about the
effort/progress ratio: sooner or later after working through the
dizzying maze of xml configs you'll notice that despite tremendous
efforts nothing is really getting done. Especially I advise avoiding
the ORM frameworks like hibernate that 'help' you deal with databases.

> pg/vfp Data Synchronization - We plan to schedule a regular data synchronization using a cron job with something like PgDBF. http://pgdbf.sourceforge.net Eventually we could turn this off once we have all reports/screens migrated into manual HTML/CMS.

yeah -- there are a number of relatively easy ways to transfer data.
If you have a copy of sql server laying around you can always try and
leverage DTS.
I'm not familiar with pgDBF so maybe you can get good results there.
barring that. I'd probably be looking at a textual conversion, dumping
the results from foxpro in some reasonable approximation of SQL and
loading them through postgres. Typically though for database to
database transfer I always and up doing the tried and true method,
manually transferring the schema with some judicious editing and text
format (csv) for data transfer.

merlin