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>>As for using the dbf's directly, well that will always be possible, but I think you will see the desire for this approach diminishing in the future as mom and pop businesses want to create an internet presense. When they want to start getting orders over the net they will want their data visible over the net and dbf's aren't a very good way to provide this for a number of reasons.
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>Out of curiosity, Jim, what are these reasons? It seems to me that the most important requirement for making information available of the web is speed of access, and as we know, VFP is nearly peerless here.

Erik,

Here are some;

1) DBF's only get speed by using Rushmore which is not a feasible technology over HTTP connections

2) On the net speed is related to moving the data over telephone lines which are slower than any data access technology rendering the faster prformance of DBF's a moot point.

3) other data technologies have built in security features beyond what VFP can give us with the native database