It's kind of funny - I followed some of the links from here to some of the
marketing literature of X-Works and a lot of that information is just
plain wrong and making assumptions that totally false.

Just a couple of glaring errors:

CGI requests (which is what X-Works uses) will always be slower than
an InProcess service like ISAPI or NSAPI or WSAPI. The overhead of
launching even a tiny EXE on Win32 outweighs even the most heavily
loaded COM method call. The assumption may be that a COM instance
is loaded on every hit, which is of course not the case since
servers are cached in a pool (by all products that use COM including
ASP, FoxISAPI and WWWC).

CPU load is not determined by the Web interface but by the application
running. There's claim of x% CPU usage, but no comparison is made
as to what code is actually running in each case. Runnign against VFP
the overhead is 99% in the VFP code, not in the Web interface regardless
of whether you use CGI/ISAPI etc. If I modify my servers to to do
nothing more than RETURN "Hello World" which would measure the overhead
of the full round trip I can run in excess of 1 million requests on
a single P200 machine with 8 server instances and still run the CPU at
less than 50%... Doing the same thing with CGI, results in slightly
higher CPU usage (55%) and much slower response times as IIS has
to go through many context switches - throughput fell to under 700,000
on that scenario. File based messaging using ISAPI (non-COM) resulted
in 875,000+ hits, which is really the closer comparison between the
CGI and ISAPI interface issues since the two are identical.


I'm pointing this out, because I've been through this painstakingly
in the past.

Anybody can make a false claim - but backing it up is another story.

+++ Rick ---



>>I'm in the process of purchasing the essentials books (all 6 of them) which includes internet applications By Rick Strahl. Would you know if this book
>>is going to include information on WWWC and explain/demonstrate how things
>>work. ..how all of the pieces fit together for the newbie WWW folk like myself?
>
>I don't have the book, but knowing Rick, I would bet that he tried to keep the book from being an advertisement for his product. So I don't think you will see a lot of WWWC specific stuff in the book, but you will probably see a lot of methods and teqhniques outlined that are implemented inside WWWC.
>
>>Would you know where I could get information on WWWC, Kind of like a quick start or short tutorial that goes through the basic stages to get something produced using WWWC?
>
>Yeah. www.West-wind.com
>
>you can download an eval version of WC for free. If you already have a web-server set up, you can have it hitting Fox data in a couple of hours. His documentation is excellent, and you will quickly start to understand how things come together once you get going with it.
>
>From what I have seen of the x-works product, it does indeed provide a quick and painless way to connect to VFP logic, but beyond a few basic tools, you are somewhat on your own as far as HTML generation goes. WWWC comes with a lot of utilities to provide for things like sessions and cookies, templates containing VFP code, multiple server sessions, etc. It also gives you quick ways to show SQL results, charts and a bunch of other stuff.