>The answer is, it depends. If the application has CPU intense calculations, then it should be on the desktop. Otherwise, if it's just retrieving and displaying data, then the web.

Hi George. I don't necessarily agree (or disagree LOL!) with you. If you having CPU intensive applications, having them on the server, allows you to have slower cheaper workstations and then spend a bit more on a 2nd processor for your server. All clients then would be able to run the app/reports at about the same speed. That 2nd or Nth processor can be dedicated to running CPU intensive queries and reports, then other process can handle general web requests. Converting our main app from pure VFP app running from a file server to server based VFP with a ASP.NET front end, meant that reports on slower clients that could take upwards up 1 or 2 minutes, could be run in a few seconds on the server. The reports were faster for 2 reasons. 1) a much faster cpu was processing the report and 2) the vfp tables were being accessed from a local disk instead of across the network.

Going off on a tangent... Since our app is server based now, I have a report server EXE (VFP of course!) that processes all report requests from clients. A real boon is that at night when no users are on the system, I can run or partially run a large number of reports or queries for really slow reports. The next day if a users happens to want to run one of those reports, they get it in a split second. This was hard to do with a pure file server (not app server) based environment.

>In either case, an n-tier development strategy will give you more flexibility in this area than otherwise.

This is where I completely agree with you. Moving from a pure VFP application that was deployed on a file server, to the same app with an ASP.NET front end was far easier because of n-tier. I just had to re-write my GUI for data entry/display and for my reports. This meant that I didn't have to debug or change (much) all of that business logic and data access routines and instead was free to concentrate on an easy to use and stable UI for my users. If my users insisted on a more rich UI, I could convert parts of the app to user Winforms (or even VFP). Or even have multiple UIs. For a 1 man IT support for large geographical area, this makes me very productive. Oh yeah, and in addition to programming I do Windows admin, teaching and general suppport... No wonder I'm starting to go grey at 39.