If you're just learning, using a low level Web Server is going to be a pain because you're not going to get any help or framework that makes it easy to get the data out and help you generate HTML. That's what the value of a framework like Web Connection really provides. Hosting HTTP is not difficult - HttpListener can make a FoxPro application host its own Web server quite easily. Any HTTP server has to explicitly enable the ports to broadcast so that issue applies to all servers (IIS actually does this automatically on server OSs).

That all said - IIS is actually much easier to set up these days as long as you install the right components the rest is basically completely automated. For development you don't even have to use IIS - you can use IIS Express which is a downloadable non-admin based implementation of IIS that's feature compatible but can be run as a standalone EXE. You point it at a folder and it just works - and it too can be opened to the Internet with a few settings changes although IMHO that's silly. On Windows IIS is the way to go for anything but development and even then it makes sense - it's built in after all.

HTML and Web development is very different, but with the right tools and a methodology its a lot easier to wrap your head around it. Using an MVC style framework (Model, View, Controller) which provides code based Web logic, and scripted HTML templates that can mix FoxPro code to me is the most efficient way to get things done on the server. But then there are also server side services you can implement and that's a whole different set of requirements and again that's what a framework like Web Connection provides. You can choose from a number of different ways to create HTML (MVC, plain scripting, ASP.NET like, or raw code) or you can build REST JSON or SOAP services and so on.

Especially if you're starting out a framework will be helpful, otherwise you end up having to write a bunch of infrastructure stuff or generating all your HTML with raw string output which gets unmaintainable very quickly.

This applies to other frameworks as well BTW, but I might be biased and think that Web Connection has a much wider range of options and features than other tools in the Foxpro space. I'm also shipping Web COnnection 6.0 this week which makes it much, much easier to manage the application life cycle from creating a new project, deploying, updating and maintaining an application, which arguably was one of the weakest points of the Web Connection framework in the past. All of that should be much easier in the new version with automated configuration scripts and a new self-contained project layout.

Hope this helps,

+++ Rick ---


>Firstly - Rick - I will no doubt end up buying your wares, but first I have to get my head around web programming in it's entirety, including stuff 'out there', and not just on localhost.
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>I am messing with Eeva web server (it's free. It doesn't require IIS, (which is a pain all unto itself!)), and it doesn't have localhost limitations. I can get data out there on a web page from local dbfs - first time I ever did this, so it is quite fun to see it happen!
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>This, I don't think, is an Eeva question, but HTML in general. I am still trying to get my head around the whole web page flow of data, with posts and responses, etc, and I am sure this will take time for a dummy like me, but my question is - if, in the web page I run on the Eeva web server, I can use memory variables from dbfs to 'say' stuff in the browser. In other words - I can represent memory variables on the screen in the browser, but how could I get data entered into a textbox (etc) into a memory variable? From what I have read, things don't work this way, but it seems so weird that I can put a memvar onto the screen, but I can't take the value of a control into a memvar.
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>Please talk to me.
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>Thanks!