John,

That's a pretty open ended question and one that really doesn't have easy answers. As others have pointed out your best is probably using a third party tool because built in support in FoxPro for Web apps is pretty much lacking. (Disclaimer: I publish Web Connection www.west-wind.com/webconnection so I'm somewhat partial to that tool <g>)...


There are really two issues that will apply - the move to Web based interfaces and the actual Web integration with Visual Foxpro. The first will require some adjustment especially and in my experience is usually the hardest transition for developers who are used to building desktop apps. The stateless nature of the Web makes this process a little unnatural at first.

The FoxPro integration is what differentiates the products as there are a host of approaches available. There's raw HTTP access where you basically get thrown the Web Server input data and a mechanism to output HTML. THis means manually building up everything. Works well for some simple scenarios but gets difficult once you start building more complex content as the branching logic usually gets pretty hairy.

Another approach is templating which is used by several vendors which provides you some way to run code either directly inside of a template page or a code mechanism that calls the template engine. IN this scheme you basically design your page and use embedded code or expressions to render your HTML. This actually works pretty well and is often a comfortable and easy to figure out mechanism for building Web interfaces. One drawback is that you mix code and markup in one place often.

Another approach is to use a full page processing engine that creates pages as object with controls as objects which is in overall concept similar to forms in desktop applications. You talk to control properties rather than writing HTML markup directly (although you can) and you have events that are fired into FoxPro code from clicks and operations on the client.

Most of the tools support the first two approaches. The core feature of every framework is how it interfaces with FoxPro. ActiveVFP uses COM and only COM. FoxWeb uses ISAPI. ACtiveFoxPro Pages use ISAPI with a pipes server. Web Connection uses ISAPI with a mixed file and COM interface (file for development, COM for deployment). The apps then receive an object that allows access to what the Web Server publishes (usually called a Request object) which provides the input to your application. You can read form variables posted from the client, querystring values sent on the URL and other information such as authentication etc.

I think the key differences in frameworks are the extent of the FoxPro integration that is provided. I can't really talk to the other tools since I haven't looked at them in a while, but Web Connection provides all three of the above mechanisms. You can do low level work (ie. raw HTML output from code), you can use templates (ie. write code in scripts or write code in PRG files and then call on temlpates/scripts to render) or you can use the rich Web Control Framework which provides an object oriented page model for the HTML layout...

You can find out about Web Connection here including a set of videos that talk about the Web Control Framework:
http://www.west-wind.com/webconnection


There are also 'built-in' solution: You can use ASP or ASP.NET with COM to directly call FoxPro servers, but frankly that approach is pretty painful to work with for development unless your needs are simple because of the COM Idevelopment cycle and lack of decent interactive debugging. If you want to go that route I have several articles that describe how to do this here:

http://www.west-wind.com/articles.asp

Lots of choices - ultimately you'll have to take a look and play around with the tools to see what fits your needs.

+++ Rick ---

>Greetings folks. Please forgive me if this question has been asked / answered ad nauseam - I haven't had much time to keep up with all the postings lately, having to support a day job, and all.
>
>I am looking for the easiest way, with the smallest learning curve of rewriting a desktop app I have to be browser based, and hosted on the web.
>
>If it weren't for the xBase language, I wouldn't ever have become involved with programming, so please don't suggest java, C#, etc - LOL!
>
>Many thanks for the help!