Fox-Toolkit

I have been using Fox-Toolkit version 1.3.15 as my development environment for 15 years now. Prior to that I used Visual Basic 5, which I loved. Ever since moving to Fox-Toolkit I've been searching for a modern equivalent to VB5. I've never found it. Over and over, following these programming language journeys, I've concluded that Fox-Toolkit really is a brilliant piece of software engineering, all of it done by one man, Dutch born, Jeroen van der Zijp, beginning in 1997.

Here's why I think it's brilliant:

1. It's just a library written in C++, but Jeroen dislikes the STL and doesn't use it. The resulting language resembles C with inheritance rather than C++. Most of time I don't even use it like you would C or C++ as I have no need to concern myself with advanced concepts like inheritance, pointers and all the rest. Instead, I use it the way you used VB... without an IDE. In VB, you created forms and modules. Most of the code was written as event code associated with a widget and shared code was placed in modules. In Fox it's the same except that the form is just a standard *.cpp text file with Fox's window creation boilerplate and a module is a standard *.cpp text file without Fox's window creation boilerplate.

2. Because it's written in C++:

• it's runs extremely fast
• providing a project is set up correctly, compile times are quick, because most of the code is already compiled previously and only needs to be linked
• any external library written in C or C++ is easily integrated
• calls to the Windows API are a breeze
• I have multiple free compilers at my disposal
• the C syntax is terse and easy to read
• there are many code indenters available to tidy your code
• if I need to, I can program at a systems level, rather than at application level without having to move to another environment.

3. It doesn't use native widgets. Instead it emulates the look and feel of Windows 95, by using operating system primitives for drawing lines, filling spaces and obtaining mouse and keyboard input. This is the best part, because, Fox cannot be broken by a third party, since those primitive API calls are extremely unlikely to change. Also... I like Windows 95! Microsoft keeps tinkering with it's look and feel for marketing reasons, but in truth, nothing substantial has appeared since Windows 95 in terms of GUI usability.

4. It has a very powerful string class called FXString. I use this constantly. Most of my programming revolves around relational databases which I query using my own disconnected recordset object, written in Fox, which parses a JSON like string into linked lists of FXString. Very simple, very fast and rock solid performance.

5. The window geometry manager avoids fixed window sizes, so Fox applications resize themselves sanely. VB didn't come close in this regard.

6. Fox comes with it's own code editor called Adie. Of course, any code editor is viable. Notepad++ is popular. But I like Adie because it's so simple.

7. The widgets collection is huge and with a bit of digging in the code you discover things are available that you don't expect. For example, recently I found that the FXTable widget lets you copy it's contents to the clipboard in tab delimited format. Spreadsheets parse this into columns and rows directly without the usual dialog palaver that comes with a CSV file. Other time savers include INI file creation which comes baked into Fox allowing window positions to be saved on exiting your application.

8.  Being open source with a liberal licence, you have access to all the source code which is reasonably easy to follow, so you can see exactly how things work. The situation has yet to arise, but if a widget doesn't have a feature I want, I can inherit a new widget from it that does exactly what I want.

9. Cross-platform development is the goal of many tools, Fox included. But, I have come to see that real world application programming is about being able to call into an operating system's API to achieve outcomes that aren't clunky workarounds. For instance, I needed to convert rtf to pdf sanely and programmatically. The best way of doing this was to call LibreOffice in headless mode, but that resulted in console windows appearing. I found the appropriate Windows API call to suppress the console windows and substituted it for the normal system() call. While I could have done something similar in other languages it would have been much more difficult to implement. With Fox it was just a bit of cutting and pasting.

Perhaps the biggest benefit of all from using Fox, is that you cannot code yourself into a corner.  So many times you start to use a tool only to find that there is some aspect of it that constrains your development. In 15 years of developing with Fox that is yet to happen. I've produced desktop applications and web sites, just using Fox-Toolkit. Check it out.