We are excited to announce that, starting in January 2012, PICS and other related WaudWare products will be completely rewritten. Why are we doing this? One of our fundamental operating philosophies has always been to make business decisions in the best interests of our customers. We attribute our success and longevity (22 years in business) to this core belief.
Our initial plan is to release the new version of PICS incrementally, and it will work in parallel with the existing version. Your users will be able to work in either version at the same time, and all data which is added, edited and deleted using the new version will update the existing PICS data (i.e. foxpro tables) live and in real time. We chose this path so we can get early feedback from our customers on the new software. We would welcome beta testers … please email us fcwaud@waudware.com to let us know if you are interested.
In addition to our existing development staff, we have a team of four 3rd year Computer Sciences students from Sheridan Institute starting in January to work with us on this project. We are excited about the fresh new ideas and concepts they will bring to our software. We hope to have something to show you by the spring of 2012.
On the technical side, as some of you know, Microsoft has ceased development of all versions of FoxPro (FP). We have closely monitored the various plans for 3rd party companies to launch products which would allow FP developers to maintain and enhance their products. However, we have not been convinced that one of these is right for our customers. We have also been researching the best platform to switch to in terms of programming language and development framework. .NET from Microsoft was an obvious candidate, but we have decided it is not the best choice for the future of PICS or our customers. We have selected Java as the programming language and NetBeans (http://netbeans.org/) as the development framework. The back end database will be chosen by our customers. We anticipate that MySQL and SQL Server will be the top 2 choices.
There is a lot more information to share. We welcome your feedback and invite you to become beta testers today!
