>I'm about to plunge into ecommerce with a non-technical friend (she's got the business expertise and contacts, I'm the geek)
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>I need some advice on how to set this puppy up. It's basically a catalog which will make a nice hierarchical database searchable by a number of keywords in a number of categories.... Simple really, could even do it in A**ess :-)
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>How do I get it out on the 'net? Write it in VFP, add in some Java applets to handle forms &c, then just dump it onto my friendly neighborhood ISP's server? Or do I need to learn some new arcane techniques here? We're looking at around 10K items eventually (but we're starting much smaller) The individual records will be quite small except for the pictures....
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>I have no clue where to start with this... All recommendations, cautionary tales, and words of wisdom welcome.
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There are a bunch of ways to handle this. Definitely take a look at http://www.west-wind.com for info. Make sure to check out the white-papers section, I'm sure it will answer a lot of questions. One thing to consider is the web-hosting costs. This might ultimately be the deciding factor on how this app. needs to be written (ie. you might end up using ASP because most ISP's support it, and it's inexpensive). Things get more complicated if you want to use COM to develop the backend, since a lot of ISP's don't want (or require a dedicated server for) anything relating to COM. But, the use of COM really makes your ASP code a lot cleaner. It's a tradeoff, really.

I'm sure someone else will jump in here with a few more VFP-to-internet links.