Walter, with all due respect, if we were going to stay with a data-centric approach, we would stay with Foxpro. It has already been decided that we are not going to be using Foxpro in the future.

>Renoir,
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>>We are moving from Foxpro to something else. That's the whole premise of this thread. We're not deciding if we are moving; we are moving.
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>You asked for recommendations. I gave you a recommendation for the business layer, and if you read it carefully I did not say that it *has* to be written in VFP. I only recommend to do it in a language that is more data centric *like* vfp. If you don't appreciate my thoughts on it, why did you post the question here ??
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>For example, I'm not too familiar with PHP or Python, but I would look into these options as well, *if* you already decided (for whatever reason) to go away from the fox. By their nature they might give you more power and flexibility than hardrock implementation in C# or Java.
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>Walter,
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>>>Renoir,
>>>
>>>From an architectual view, I'd say that keeping you business rules layer in a data centric programming language (like VFP) makes more sense than trying to do this in a low level language like Java or .NET. It might pay off when business rules are less static. You can store the business rules in a table, and process them in VFP very clean and quickly. This is much harder to do in .NET or java technologies.
>>>
>>>In very much the same way we have build a HL7 parser: Code in a table, that might be different for each and every client for each and every message type, without having to compile.
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>>>Walter,
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>>>
>>>>We are looking towards moving everything away from Foxpro and towards a new technology. Probably over 3 to 5 years. These are the layers we initially outlined:
>>>>
>>>>Presentation Layer - Thin client and some thick client (browser-based, Java, C#).
>>>>Application Server Layer - Handle requests from Presentation Layer and outside sources (Java or C#).
>>>>Business Rules Layer - Interpret requests and return/update data in the Data Layer (Java or C#).
>>>>Data Layer - SQL Server or Oracle.
>>>>
>>>>Any very general recommendations as to whether C# or or Java would be better choices? Is there a right and wrong combination of languages across the layers?
>>>>
>>>>Looking for some very broad thoughts here.