For those who are following the play by play, I met again with my client for another 3 - 4 hour "strategy" session. This time I came armed<s>.

I brought in whole articles and first pages of articles pertaining using VFP and MTS, VFP and ADO, VFP and ASP, VFP and FoxISAPI, information about Web Connection and high load conditions, IIS and VFP. I brought in full copies of the review of the JFAST and the EuroTunnel projects. Today I got the Jan 99 edition of Software Development magazine, copied the VFP article (highlighting the part talking about VFP being twice as fast as SQL Server) and brought that in as well.

Over the weekend I took a full day overview course of SQL 7.0. It's actually pretty impressive, but it ain't the Fox<s>.

The other developer wasn't in today, but listened in on conference call.

The articles were impressive and appeared to work. I think I blew out the scalability arguments and some, but not all, of the strategic arguments. The long and the short of it is (at least this week) -- continue development of the app using DBFs. When developed, the application will be modified to be appropriate for a client/server application. Now the company will have both a LAN version screamer and a client/server version.

This is compared to having DBFs for the view only data and SQL Server handling all read/writes within the same application, for *all* clients. What I suggested was that was overkill for the traditional LAN environment -- VFP handles read/writes just fine, just like their current FPW product. And that client/server app is appropriate for certain situations, but not for everything. Changing the read/write handling to SQL Server would change the interface across modules -- read only local VFP data would have one mechanism, read/write data another.

...which leaves the browser application. A fairly high number of users use the FPM 2.6 product (maybe about 25%?), and a Macintosh solution needs to be developed. I suggested Web Connection as an option, because of speed of directly reading DBFs. We'll see where that goes (I'm assuming Mac clients are handled -- cranking out Web pages is independent of the front end, correct? Okay, I know that's not entirely true, VBScript has no Mac equivalent, but I'm referring to graphics, text and links -- the meat and potatoes...).

Bill Anderson