>Is it possible to use a client VFP appliation (rather than
>IE/Netscape) to talk to the VFP COM object created with ISAPI?
>Could the COM be amde to response with formats other than
>HTML? Would it be too complicated to do so?

Yes. You can use several tools to do this. One is my free
wwIPStuff library. If you have VFP 6.0 check out the following
demo:

http://www.west-wind.com/wwHTTPDemo.app

which demonstrates data access over HTTP in a number of different
ways from pulling HTML to pulling raw data and even running
queries over the Web. It's all VFP code on both ends of the
connection.

There's an article that goes along with this at:

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

Look for the Distributed Applications over HTTP document.


>On the other hand, would it be simple (if not reliable)
>to use Winsock (plus message queues if necessary)
>for two distanced VFP applications to communicate over internet?
>This kind of things could be achieved easily with UNIX IPC
>primitives, but not seems to be quite complicated to immitate
>in Windows networking.

You can do that, but it's more work as you basically have to
create your own protocols. Using HTTP is somewhat easier because
you have a standard data format in which data is communicated,
and you can use standard Web tools on the back end to get at
it. The client side also uses standard HTTP formats - this way
you don't have to reinvent the wheel. Also, building a scalable
TCP/IP server in VFP is not possible since VFP is single threaded
and wouldn't be able to handle multiple processing connections
simultaneously. Again with HTTP you can use standard Web tools
which allow you to work around those issues by running server
pools.