I am writing an application in VFP9 that needs to interface with a utility provided by another company. This utility was written in Java. They were concerned that VFP would not be able to interface with it. [..] Does anybody have any ideas what could be done?


I don't think there is an ideal answer..

Is your VFP application the client/host, and the required interactions stateless and modal? If so, you could wrap the Java classes into a command-line program and call it from VFP using Windows Scripting Host. (or RUN/! if you have to).

Alternatively, or if the interactions are not stateless, then another way of doing it is create a web server (Apache/JSP) that exposes the Java utility as a web service, and use an XmlHttp COM control from VFP to interact with it.

- Colin