LEARN JAVA AND XBASEJ

LEARN JAVA AND XBASEJ

introduction

why this book?

I asked myself that same question every day while I was writing it.

Why am I going to writea book much like my other books and give it away for free?

The simple answer is that I had to doa lot of the research anyway.

If I have to do that much research, then I should put out a book.Given the narrowness

of the market and the propensity for people

in that market to believe allsoftware developers work for free the book would

physically sell about two copies if I had itprinted. (Less than 1/10th of 1% of all Linux users actually pay for any software or technologybook they use.)

What started me down this path was a simple thing. In order to make a Web site really

work,a family member needed to be able to calculate the 100 mile trucking rate for the commoditybeing sold. The commercial Web site had a

really cool feature where it would automatically sortall bids within 300 miles based upon the prbushel profit once the transportation costs were takenout

The person already had a printed list of the trucking rates, so how difficult could it be?
Some questions should never be asked in life. “What could go wrong?” and “How difficultcould it be?”

are two which fall into that category. When you ask questions like that, you tend toget answers

you were unprepared to hear.

In my early DOS days, I would have sat down and begun coding up a C program usingGreenleaf DataWindows

and the Greenleaf Database library. Of course, back then, we didn't havethe Internet, so I would have

had to use the Greenleaf CommLib to dial out to

some BBS to getthe DOE (Department of Energy) national average fuel price.
During later DOS days, but before Microsoft wrote a taskswitching GUI that sat

on top ofDOS and that was started by typing WIN at the C:>
prompt which they had the audacity to call“The Windows Operating System,”

I would have reached for a C/C++ code generator like ProCfrom Vestronix (
later ProC Corp.)
or DataBoss from Kedwell Software. Neither program didcommunications, but both

could be used to quickly lay out xBASE databases, generating entry/maintenance screens,

menus, and reports in a matter of minutes. You could create an entireapplication that used just

a few files for distribution, all of which could be copied into a singledirectory, and the user would be happy.
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