>>Actually I've found PHP (and Apache) quite easy to get running and get usable results. True, I spent about three full days (spread across two weeks) getting Apache running my pages, but then I had just as much, if not more, frustration in trying to get a VFP COM server run again under IIS 5, even with Rick's wizards. At least with PHP when I screw up, the error messages are right on the spot, not cryptic, and it's quite easy to find and fix.
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>Well part of the reason for that is that COM configuration is inherently difficult, but if you want to use VFP for Web applications with IIS COM is pretty much the only high performance option out there... I won't deny that that approach has its issues, although there have been changes made in Web Connection recently that should mitigate most of this (I'm talknig about the DCOM permissions issues here specifically).
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>The problem on that end specifically is using VFP on the Web because VFP was never natively designed to run as a Web backend so any way you look at it hooking VFP into a Web application is working around the limitations around VFP's architecture.

I agree. The feat of actually having VFP run websites is a remarkable thing by itself.

The combination I think would work best for me is to do Web stuff in LAMP, with VFP being the data pump to crunch and munch the data (and prepare chunks of HTML) into MySql tables.

>These issues don't exist either with PHP or ASP.NET for that matter. But of course then you lose the ability to use VFP... Scripting languages are by definition to be easy to use once you've set up the server. Server configuration is rarely easy though and even the best efforts at auto-configuration can be foiled by overzealous Administrative policies <s>...
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>Trade offs are everywhere <s>...

Yes... over the recent years I've heard nearly horror stories about what overzealous admins can brand as dangerous. Seems to me most of them don't really know what they're doing most of the time, so they just build this "everything is forbidden unless I say so" policy as a moat around their castle. And in there, they can be ignorant and insecure all they want, nobody knows :).