>Rick, you are one of the most respected people arround here, but here I have to firmly disagree with you..
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>Here is exactly where the flaw is. Connectlivity is an issue, up here in europe, but also in NA. If you are in concrete buildings your connection to the internet is highly unreliable. Having applications (or apps) that store data locally, you can work with it without the internet, just I could lookup my contact details in my Phone without being connected. I can run through my emails without being connected. I can write an email or tekst message without being connected. I view videos and listen to music without being connected. I can work on an excell sheet, write a word document and read PDFs without being connected. More over, I would be broke if I only could do software development with tools that require internet connection. As far as development goes, EVERYTHING is local, including the SQL server, so that I can carry the whole development environment on my laptop. That's ALL local data.

Granted it is still an issue today, but on that front the largest advances are achieved today. I remember optimizing vfp queries that ran acceptably on 100MB Lan but were slow on 10MB-Hub connected subislands. On todays 1-10GB there is probably much more unoptimized stuff occurring if a vfp-dbf based storage is used, but it very often is not even realized that a large part of response time could be optimized away. So builing web only and waiting for network to speed up is swimming with the tide.

>I remember there was an award winning VFP application a long time ago, about tuning engines of race cars. Why on earth do you even want to attempt to turn that into a web app?

One point: deployment! having changes in a web app reflected in the next brwosr reload is huge, as is the Java option to "deploy" via the internet or even bootstrap the whole application on each start if it makes better biz sense. Unless the machine developed on is the same as running the app, such "bootstrappability" with the option to save just for caching/load time speed is nice. Coming from one argueing for local storage ;-)

regards

thomas