[Leaplist] Harbour

[Phil Barnett]

On Wednesday 26 September 2007, Steve Litt wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Harbour Project is a free software workalike for CA-Clipper. Last time I
> heard, Phil Barnett was the lead maintainer. Jack BigTruck also uses
> Harbour. I just installed Harbour, and now have some questions for Phil,
> Jack, or anyone else who knows Harbour.

Harbour is Clipper, which is compiled dBase III+ and very much like Foxbase.

Harbour is also still somewhere in the middle of it's first beta cycle and in 
my opinion it's not time to hang commercial software on it. Simply because 
it's not completely defined yet.

> * Where can I find a beginner's tutorial?

The language is Clipper. Any Clipper tutorial will do. I have several books 
here.

> * How do I write and run a Hello World?

I'll see if I can find a tutorial for you.

> * Can Harbour easily interface with Postgres and MySQL?

Harbour has replaceable data drivers, so yes.

> * Can Harbour manage input screens that write to database columns?

Of course.

> * Can those screens represent fields from joined tables?

.dbf files are not relational in any modern sense of the word, so you can do 
whatever you can dream of. If you use SQL, you can enforce referential 
integrety, but you will have to do that programmatically if you use .dbf's 
for storate.

> * Any other words of wisdom?

If you loved dBase or Clipper, then Harbour is a natural extension. If you 
have no experience with dBase or Clipper, then I'd suggest you write most of 
your data access routines in SQL in stored procedures and use any old front 
end to get the data in and out. There's probably 100 languages that will do 
the deed.

> I was going to automate my business in Rails, but now I want to explore
> other possiblities including Harbour and Dabo. In other words, I'm not
> committed to making my business automation a web app.

Ruby on Rails carries a pretty steep overhead.
 
-- 
Phil Barnett
AI4OF
SKCC #600