Jeff,

My comments were not directed to you specifically, but in general to the whole bunch of folks that are crying about N-Tier architecture "not being needed for small apps". Also, I never meant to say that a system should be all VFP, but rather that if a system is all VFP it should also be N-tier. You are right in that N-Tier designs must allow swapping of tiers and that COM/DCOM should not be an issue. My comment in that area was meant to say that COM/DCOM are not requirements for a system to be N-Tier (as is also true for database servers). The issue of ado and the vfp middle tier is only an implementation issue.

There are ways to use a vfp middle tier object and move data quite efficiently. You can require that the front end tier register with the server and the server can alter the way it serves up data according to the front end that is making the request.