A framework for fox, used in Zero and a few more places. More of a RAD tool than a framework, it has too many wizards and too many things in the procedural luggage from FPD (i.e. DOS days), and (insert arbitrary curse here) soooo many public variables. Too heavy, too rich and too restraining. Most of the time I was fighting it instead of using it. Something in the philosophy didn't fit the needs.
It didn't even have a proper migration routine to cross from one version to the next, it had a lengthy list of steps to do. I stewed them up into one piece of script, which crossed some 3-4 versions at once.
Just like some other tools from that early era, this one was also unable to decide whether it should serve programmers or lightly trained users. While it's true that it was capable of doing lots of things - imagine if I had a year to fuck around with GenerAll and retambourine it into fox 5.0, it would possibly look close to that, with lots of Dos style luggage. Being so in-between, I think it succeeded in annoying both kinds. It was quite complicated for beginners, until they learn what goes where, how one must do these things, what must not be done and specially what can and what can not be done, and then they'd become productive. Though, as soon as they start doing anything more complicated and run into a bug, of their own or of tool's making, the suffering began, because the code was quite convoluted internally, depending on a hundred of two of public variables, with cryptic and often wrong names, nobody untangles that.
As a programmer, I was annoyed by it, immensely. It simply took away my controls over fox, half of things were locked away, the keyboard shortcuts in editors stopped working, the editors would just close on a whim - on click out, or any wrong move, it just closes it and you can't be sure whether it saved or not, nor can you remember what were you doing, why and where exactly, all chaos and waste of time and nerves all day. And it also insisted on some of its own settings, which always overrode mine. I might have forgiven it for doing so while it ran, but not clearing even more of those on exit. Why did it do that?
No love was lost.
4-IX-2019 - 17-VII-2026