What Can I Expect?

[stanlyn]

Hi,

Barry asked that I move this discussion to the forum, (here). He has commented on some and I have more questions...

1. We use phdbase for fulltext searching of memo and character fields. The tables contains about a million records and each record's memo field has about 2000 characters. The search needs to be fast while returning info such as "number of matching records", proximity and weighted values, ant other. Note that MSSQL's full text capabilities can provide all the functionality the phdbase provides and that may be the ticket if Lianja can easily integrate this.

>Lianja does not support full text indexing.

a. Are you only referring to its native database? How would we replace the required full text searching that our clients have loved over the years with Lianja?

2. Does Lianja play well with all the .net libraries out there such as Leadtools Imaging, scanning, ocr, pdf and etc. I see that most notable 3rd party vendors all have invested in bringing their wares to the .net platform, and we would like to leverage their offerings. It’s now all about options and making sure our chosen dev platform can integrate with all...

>Yes. It has full COM/ActiveX support albeit just on windows not linux or Mac.

a. Do you ever expect to be able to use .net controls or libraries? I ask that because many 3rd party libraries are no longer developing activeX and/or com controls. Instead they have replaced those versions with .net and/or html5 versions which are being furtherly developed.

3. How is Lianja adapting to the NOW technologies like "Responsive Design" and "Disconnected Databases" that the world is quickly adapting for mobile computing.

>Responsive design is standard. Disconnected databases are on the development roadmap.

a. I hope we are talking about the same thing here… By responsive, I mean the form will automatically adapt to the device’s screen format.

4. Does Lianja have a "command window" such as VFP?

>Yes Lianja has a command window known as the command workspace.

5. What is Lianja's reporting limitations? Any graphing widgets, can it use 3rd party controls? Crystal Reports?

>Lianja has many built in charting components. You can integrate with crystal reports through Activex if required.

6. Is Lianja considered as fully OOP, as VFP menus and ?? were not.

>Yes.

7. Is it multi-threaded so control can be given back to the user as soon as a long running process is started? This is a productivity issue.

>No. You can however spawn concurrent execution of long running tasks.

a. Can the main parent instance still have control of the spawned process? Like cancelling the spawned or showing a progress bar?

8. Can multiple instances of Lianja be started?

>Lianja App Builder is used to develop apps in a single instance. Lianja App Center (runtime) can be run as many tines as you want.

a. So, if I was developing something and a client called and I needed to load up their code, are you saying that I cannot fire up another instance of Lianja to work on the customers issue without closing the previously opened instance?

9. Is the Lianja server license perpetual, where it can be used for years to come without any additional fees. I would expect to pay for any upgrades and/or support. We are without reservation shunning all tools and runtimes that requires an annual license...

>Yes, the license is perpetual.

10. FWIW, I attended the Alpha Developer conference last October in Boston and am very impressed with its offerings. However, and I mean however, its methodology about doing things is about as different as it can be for VFP developers. It's really strange for a VFP person, but would probably be easy for a clean slate (a person with no prior programming experience).

I would recommend you watch the videos online on the website and read through the developers guide.

a. I will watch more videos…

The download will provide you with a free 30 day trial.

a. I’ll do an eval after asking essential questions and based on whether I can live with the answers/limitations. It take a long time to discover the gotchas when evaluating, so its best to lay those questions out before deep diving…

Thanks,
Stanley

[barrymavin]

Stanley,

Lianja is a cross platform / cross device product -- not just for windows desktop applications, so there are reasons why things are done the way they are.

As I already stated Lianja does not support full text indexing (which is not the same as full text searching).

We have no intention of integrating Lianja as a .net development product. If you want to develop .net applications and use .net components on a large scale Lianja is not the product for you.

Yes Lianja pages and sections have a responsive UI. Install it and you will see. Look at the different views "Desktop App View", "Web App View" and "Tablet App View".

Lianja does not support multi threaded execution -- it is not a desktop only product.

No you can't communicate directly between desktop processes to determine their progress.

No as I already answered, The Lianja App Builder opens up as one instance. If you need that ability install another copy in a VM as the Lianja APaaS Developer license allows for 3 activations.

You will better answer many of your questions by downloading and playing around with the example apps that are included in the distribution.

[HankFay]

Hi Stanley,

PhDBase was quite a unique product: Jim Korenthal was (it appears from the Fox Wiki that he might have passed) an absolute genius, from friends who knew him.

Your questions, as you point out, come from a VFP development perspective, which is expectable. The problem is that the new development platforms represent a paradigm shift in how programs run. When the paradigm for any product category shifts, the questions that need to be asked also shift -- but can't be known until the new paradigm has become part of your knowledge base. That's not particular to Lianja: it's part of all paradigm shifts.

Take autonomous cars: Elon Musk says 2020, Jim Kanter says 2025, for general availability. At that point the question of "how much is the sticker price" will become irrelevant, because you will won't bother to buy a car anymore: it will be cheaper, and easier, to call a car on a phone app and have it arrive in a minute or so. Change the paradigm, and the questions change.

I started digging in to Lianja from the first beta, 3 years ago -- I saw a paradigm shift coming and knew I had to dig in early, as I'm a slow learner, although in the end a decent comprehender. I started out with the kinds of questions you are asking. I'm still here. <s>

hth,

Hank

[stanlyn]

Hi Hank,

Yes, I too see that paradigm shift and I see its implications are huge especially to a vfp desktop developer. Keyword here is desktop...

When I started programming back around 1981, it was on a centralized multi-user SCO Unix box, and boy what it could do... The accounting code that I wrote back then still serves us today and our last hardware update was to a P3-1000 with 256MB ram and a scsi 9.1gb harddrive back around 1998. Its all still running and is used every today, and its fast.

Remember the marketing campaign that Bill done in 1995/96 to promote the new "Windows 95" os? That changed the computing world. That operating system marketing campaign pushed computers and the internet to what we have today, and boy "what a paradigm shift". That was also the most notable start of distributed (de-centralized) computing and I hated it, because of all the issues that was created at the local workstation. With unix, we had dumb terminals where little to nothing could go wrong, and now data was being de-centralized as well. I was an early adapter of the Windows platform and integrated it along with the unix systems I was selling and supporting because it did bring value to my customers.

I fired up VFP in 1998 and still use and deploy it today. It allowed me to market a deedroom management system where land record offices used then to scan and index then their customers could quickly and easily find images of interest based on vfp seeks and phdbase full text searches.

Concerning FullText searches... all I'm hearing Barry say is that Lianja will not support full text searching. Is that really true? It appears that he is dismissing the a possible solution using sql server's fulltext tooling. Why couldn't one pass a sql fulltext query statement and fetch back those records into a cursor (vfp tmp table), then do whatever?

Barry... please explain your position more here as fulltext searching is a very important part of what we build. In fact, we have a lot of business because our competition does not have that capability.

Now for the past 10 years or so now, I see the paradigm shift back to centralized computing via web servers and services. And now of-course we are seeing mobile added to the mix, another major paradigm shift.

As I said in my original inquiry that I attended the Alpha Anywhere conference in Boston last year, in search for a VFP replacement. It is quite capable, however I find its so difficult because of my VFP background, where as they said I've been spoiled by VFP.

At this point I'm looking at other alternatives because Alpha was lacking "really good intellisense", lacking the ability "to highlight a keyword and press the F1 key for really good help with sample code", it lacks "good written and organized documentation" as it is all scattered about, it does however has an enormous amount of videos, but without good organization (all scattered about). Also many tasks cannot be done via code, instead we have to use the gui. Their command window is far less productive that VFPs.

I still have a few more questions before doing the eval...

1. Where are the videos at that walks a new user thru the new paradigm of building a simple parent/child application with a report, filtering and searching as well a menu system.

2. Any videos/docs on the more advanced topics like integrating ActiveX or com?

3. Any videos/docs on making and using web services?

4. How about videos/docs dealing with using a smart phones camera and geo capibilities allowing a user to take a photo and send it back to the server along with its geo data and other data collected by the apps user forms?

5. Is it fair to say that really good help is provided with the eval download, or is it web based?


I'm asking these questions up front as I really don't have the time to try out everyone's toolkit, instead I do a high level overview and ask pointed questions based on what I learned from the last evals. If all that goes well, then I'll spend time in the evals.

Selecting something as important as a programming toolkit that is replacing and/or augmenting VFP is a super time intensive task. And, it doesn't help when VFP brought so much to the table, and I really don't want to lose any of those features.

To be fair so far, Visual Studio 2014 has an incredible wow factor to everything I've seen so far. And yes, so is its learning curve, so I guess that one negates the other, which is why I'm here...

Thanks,
Stanley

[barrymavin]

Hi Stanley,

"Concerning FullText searches... all I'm hearing Barry say is that Lianja will not support full text searching. Is that really true? It appears that he is dismissing the a possible solution using sql server's fulltext tooling. Why couldn't one pass a sql fulltext query statement and fetch back those records into a cursor (vfp tmp table), then do whatever?"

As I answered previously Lianja does not support full text search. Lianja does support static queries of the type "give me all records in this table that contain this word or phrase anywhere" but these are statically defined. They are known as "Instant selections" in Lianja. For example you can query all records that contain "USA" or "UK" or "Stanley" anywhere -- including in memo/varchar fields. You cannot however perform dynamic full text searches across all records in a table.

That is not to say that you cannot use Virtual Tables against MSSQL / MySQL or other SQL database and use full text search -- which you can do.

Virtual Tables are bound to a section.

One of the methods on a section is requery( "somesql_statement" )

So there is nothing stopping you re-querying a target SQL data source to refresh the section with the result of the query that you have specified.

Issuing a requery() on a section re-executes the query and populates the local cursor then refreshes the data into the section that it is bound to.

[stanlyn]

Hi Barry,

In Fox, I can issue a

scan for "barry" $ table.memofield
or
set filter to "barry" $ table.memofield
or
select * where "barry" $ table.memofield

and get a record set that contained only records where the memofield contains the phrase "barry" anywhere in it, and it would do it across all records. This can also be dynamic such as: set filter to allt(thisform.textbox.value) $ table.memofield. We do this kind of stuff all the time...

And Lianja does not support this style with its own native data???

Thanks, Stanley

[barrymavin]

Hi Stanley,

Yes of course it does but that is not "Full text indexing" its is "Full text search" they are two completely different things.

Look at the CONTAINS() function in the doc wiki it does more than a simple word search it allows you to search for words or phrases from a list.
http://www.lianja.com/doc/index.php/CONTAINS()

Full text indexing uses an index to look for the text rather than a sequential scan.

[stanlyn]

Hi Barry,

Thanks for the link as that revealed many of the functions that I've been using over the years. I did notice that the contains() function actually refers to its use in building full-text indexes...

Is there a in-line functions file such as a pdf that contains all these functions in a linear format which would allow fast reading as opposed to opening up a link for each one. And a step-by-step guide would also be of interest.

Is there any advanced topic videos, like the ones I previously asked for in message #4? If not, then how would I know how to implement them?

I see a lot in the wiki and I'll start exploring that...

Thanks,
Stanley

[barrymavin]

Hi Stanley,

No the reference doc is all in wiki format, and yes there are a lot of commands and functions that are not in VFP.

[HankFay]

Hi Stanley,

note that at the bottom of the Wiki Contents panel on the left, is a print/export link:

I haven't used it for a couple of years -- IIRC, you can do an entire section or category at a time.

enjoy,

Hank