>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.

Well but that still leaves VFP's weak spot in the picture which is its lack of true multi-threading. If VFP is the 'data pump' it still ends up being a server that has to serve multiple requests simultaneously. That's where the rub lies <s>... There are many high end applications that get around this of course, but it's not as easy as sticking an ASP.NET page on a server and firing against SQL server (or PHP + MySql) because of the infrastructure issues.

As you say it is amazing what is possible. Back in 1997 the Surplus app I was working on was serving close to 20 million data hits a day during its peak with a 3 server farm - and that was 10 years ago. Imagine what could be possible with today's faster processors and disks and the improved software since. I have several WWWC customers who are running even greater volumes today and they're not even stressing a single quad processor box. But even so the load characteristics of VFP are volatile and while it can work very well for some transactional scenarios it often works horrible for long running/report style scenarios...

>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 :).

<g> Don't get me started on that.