Finally, I have to face the reality and move to Windows; and this is
my question:
We (MIS department) are going to develop a custom quotation/ordering
system. It will take user input, data from central MRP package
(Macola, Btrieve database format) and from dbf (Clipper) files. The
application will interactively communicates with users, generate
reports and transfer data to Btrieve files.
The interactive communication means, that, based on user input,
certain (Btrieve) data have to be processed which will affect the next
selection/options and so on. It follows, the database access must be
fast (ODBC is not "fast" or is it?). Btrieve files I'm talking about
have typically tens of thousands records, tens of megs.
The resulting application will be more than browsing/reporting tool.
For the nature of our product lines, there have to be a lot of
decision making based on input, data from many files and a set of
rules.

Our present applications are developed in Clipper 5, DOS. Even for
Windows users. We are going to move to Windows within couple of weeks.

Our choices are:

- FiveWin: the biggest advantage is that it is "Clipper for Windows",
i.e. programming environment we know, a majority of our programs
(tens, maybe hundreds of thousands lines) is written in it. We have
third party Btrieve library for Clipper (RaSQL; should work for
FiveWin?).

- Visual Basic: we have one application written in it; we have Btrive
library as well.

- Delphi: I would like to find out how delphi compares to FiveWin.

- C/C++: it won't probably fly.

- Something else?

You can contact me at

Thank you

Jindra