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Visual FoxPro (VFP)

Definition - What does Visual FoxPro (VFP) mean?

Visual FoxPro (VFP) is a procedural, object-oriented and data-centric programming language produced by Microsoft and originally developed by Fox Software in 1984 as FoxBASE, which was meant for rapid application development focusing on data and was the fastest PC-based database engine during its time. Visual FoxPro is essentially a relational database that comes with an object-oriented programming environment, which makes it an ideal tool for data-centric application development.

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Techopedia explains Visual FoxPro (VFP)

Visual FoxPro is used for developing data-centric desktop applications with its own internal database. Applications developed with VFP are also able to communicate with different database systems such as Oracle, mySQL, SQL Server and many other OLE-DB accessible data sources. But, generally, most VFP applications talk to SQL Server as well as to its own native database engine.

As a dynamic object-oriented language, VFP supports multiple class libraries as well as a class browser and is able to provide dynamic subclassing (during run-time) and data dictionary capabilities. Visual FoxPro operates on dynamic inheritance and instantiates classes directly from a class library or base classes and modify these at run-time.

Uses of Virtual FoxPro include:
  • Object-oriented rapid application development
  • Data processing
  • As a COM client/server
  • Fast text processing
  • Data munging
  • Creating and consuming XML natively
  • Creating and consuming Web services
  • GUI front-end and middle tier (business rules) in N-tier architectures
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