John,

I believe that this is a crucial and critical piece of information.

Where can I obtain some confirmation that VFP will, under any circumstance (or even under what particular circumstances) create re-entrant (ie "stateless", to use your (and possibly the proper) terminology) EXEs (and DLLs?)?

Surely this must be documented somewhere, and I have yet to come across anything wich even suggests it to be true.

Jim N


>>But that would be an impossible task anyways if VFP itself cannot >create such components in the first place.
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>Not so. VFP can stateless components. Managing state is more of an issue of design than implementation. Yes, implementation plays a big role, but the design is key....
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>>Is there anything anywhere which says that VFP *can* do so? I guess, in its simplest form, we would need to be able to create 'reentrant' apps for this to be true.
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>>Cheers,
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>>Jim N
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>>>When you bring the whole MTS apsect into things, it brings up the stateful/stateless concept. With MTS, your apps and compnents need the ability to be stateless. Why? Because you won't have a constant connection to the middle tier components. In other words, they are not waiting for you to do something. Rather, they come to life when you make a request, they do thier thing, and they immediately go dormant again. From a performance/connection conservation standpoint, this is much more desireable. However, these type of apps are inherently more difficult to develop. If for no other reason, it represents a different way of thinking.
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>>>At this point, I don't think any framework, and this includes VFE, has attacked the state issue head-on. This will be the next, and probably most difficult next step.
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>>>>Thanks for your reply John. Yeah, I have to admit that I am really not very experienced with all this N-tier, COM, Microsoft Transaction Server, super duper development stuff. So, my statement that MM "definitely" supports N-tier, could be a little hasty. I get the concept and believe that MM does, or can. It definitely is structured with the idea of having your business logic seperated from your presentation layer. But, now that you have pointed this out, I have to admit that I am not sure if it truely can be transfered into a true "N-tier" type of situation or not. And it is probably debateable between some people. I am really enjoying learning as much as I am using Mere Mortals. Thanks for your reply.