Is there a problem with dBASE? Is it becoming obsolete?

I've been working with dBASE since the first dBASE for Windows, in early 1996. The development team of my company has written in dBASE, and marketed, more than one hundred programs of the most varied characteristics:

• Commercial Management, billing and warehouse.
• Control patients in hospital services as Neurosurgery and Nuclear Medicine.
• A program that thousands of users downloaded from a financial company to gain access to the movements of their accounts without needing to be connected.
• Programs that use banks for their own services.
• Management College professional who is used throughout Spain
• Management communities irrigators.
• Management service water council.
• Creating a working framework itself that has enabled us to write an expert, based on templates, which generates the framework of a comprehensive program in just ten minutes.
• Creating a scripting language with flow control structures and facilities for local variables that can be integrated into programs.

We have our developments ido adapting to new versions of dBASE so that over 80% of our programs are used and improvements in the latest versions of dBASEPlus, the rest is almost everything in dB2k and only 3 programs are operating in dBASE 16 bit (Visual dBASE)
dBASE for Windows is the product with which we feel more comfortable to program in Windows, which could best take advantage of all our experiences Clipper, which was the language we used in DOS.

Robert Bravery recently wrote that, among other things, he liked dBASE command line. What I like in dBASE is that I write using the dBASE at the command line.

So far, virtually everything we want to do with dBASE, in one way or another, we have done.

But ... and here comes what in my opinion is being dBASE becoming more and more obsolete.

In the IDE

The program editor is poor, very poor. The visual design tools are well but are a small part of the program. Most of the time spent in the program editor and when you're using in each project multitude of functions and classes with their methods and properties, both the kernel of language as their own, the minimum that you would expect from an editor is having completion of functions, variables and classes, highlighted and analysis of syntax, that all the explanations we have written to document the methods available when we are going to use. An editor style of PHPEd Nusphere or any of the modern editors is essential for an IDE who wants to live up to the times.

Tools documentation javadoc-style or phpDocumentor, but obviously can be programmed in dBASE contribute to this modern IDE.

In implementing OOP

The implementation of the class system is simple… too simple way for current programming.

Unable to define an interface and ask your programmers to implement this interface in a particular class. Obviously I can tell my programmers who inherit a particular class and give content to all methods that there are defined but at doing so I’ve to trust my developers because there is nothing in the language which obliges them to do so.

I can say that a property or method is protected and therefore can not be used outside the classroom, but I can not say that a method is final and can not be overwritten by legacy or a method that is private and can not be used by classes inherited…

Unable to define abstract classes or successfully implement methods static.

You can not easily implement patterns as Singleton.

The data access

It is necessary to eliminate the dependence of BDE especially issues of coexistence with other applications based on BDE.

The platform

With the emerging Linux operating system Ubuntu style, if we had a development tool such as dBASE for such environments would have a market with great potential, why I need more independence from the approach the platform. NET. This is simply dreaming…

By Juan Pedro