Visual FoxPro, from Microsoft, is rarely given the recognition it deserves. It has one of the fastest native database engines you will find anywhere.

Visual FoxPro provides the environment and tools you need to create and manage high-performance database applications and components. With its robust tools and data-centric, object-oriented language, you can build modern, scalable, multi-tier applications that integrate client/server computing and the Internet. Visual FoxPro is commonly abbreviated as VFP.

Unlike most database management systems, VFP is a full-featured, dynamic programming language that does not require the use of an additional general-purpose programming environment. It can be used to write not just traditional applications but middleware and web applications as well.

FoxPro was born to do data with much less coding, and is used in many mission critical applications. It is a true object-oriented language with a rich set of visual development tools that makes short work of building complex applications. Its native tables are the key to building single workstation and small LAN applications without using a SQL server that adds cost and administrative complexity to applications. It connects seamlessly to SQL databases and has XML support built in to manipulate data and will handle hundreds of thousands of records with no perceptible slowdown in performance.

With Visual FoxPro, you can replace components, textboxes, command buttons, list boxes, etc with classes in less than 60 seconds. Thereafter, changing a property or behaviour of any classes only takes a few seconds and automatically flows through every single form in the application.

FoxPro can incorporate Active X Documents or OLE servers for an environment where running an application continuously isn’t desirable or practical. For web sites you can build COM objects for 3-tier applications, using HTML as the front-end and FoxPro tables at the back end.