I think you mean the Visual Pro Matrix framework (VPM)
Greetings All, Does anyone out here have or know of anyone with knowledge of the internals of the Promatrix framework? Expert knowledge to make changes to the framework itself needed. Thanks! Jim Duffy jduffy@codemag.com
www.tek-tips.com
That was 2 years ago.
I don't know any Foxpro applicationframeworks that are still actively developed or even just supported. You already have one with FFC and the application wizard coming with VFP, obviously not the best, or nobody would have developed an application framework offering more than that.
Generally a framework is something that extends pure basic VFP with features not directly part of the language. As you program for many years and hopefully have created components you reused in many projects, you already have your own framework. Maybe you never thought of it that way, maybe you actually always developed your solutions individually, most will do a mix of both. Anyway, a frmaework is most of the time programmed with VFP itself, so it doesn't add to the language itself, it adds classes, constrols (based on the native VFP controls), libraries, wizards, builders, not necessarily anything you couldn't do on your own, but frameworks solve basic needs of an application developer, like internationalization, data access, business logic, 3 tier architecture, more specific controls like a numeric textboix, currency, textbox, date textbox or datepicker instead of the basic textbox, things that are from a few steps to do yourself to needing years of experience to develop in a concise way.
Would you profit? If there's something in it which you never developed, perhaps. A framework is not like a consumer device as a tv, for example. Plug it in, turn it on, watch tv. It requires learning, relearning what you alrady do differently, sometime that can take longer than doing it with your own knowledge in details. But it's usually so much, that there are things you profit of, and it's all from one source, not stiched together.
Whether it pays if you find it and try to learn it without support, depends. How eager are you to dig into the code of others to understand it and use it, extend it, mend it, refactor it? That's not only true specifically for VPM, but for any other framework.
What it's not: like the .NET framework, that calls itself framework and also is - MS does not deceive anyone, but it is a framework in the sense of a collection of libraries that offer any functionality and feature you can think of. It's a very large collection and, actually, within the .NET framework you also find subsets that are meant as application frameworks or architecture like ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Core, Blazor. Just to give you a comparison. It would not explain anything if you never did anything .NET, though.
, addons from vfpx and others (like chilkat, viscom,..) we never had a need for a framework.