John,

>I looked at the Active FoxPro Page stuff in Los Angeles at the LA Fox conference. FWIW, Rick Strahl was doing this sort of thing several years ago. Binding business logic in a layer that is meant for scripts seems to me to be a recipe for hardship down the road. And eventhough Rick was doing this a while ago, I think he would agree that is not the proper place for business logic.

It really depends on what you want to do. You're right Web Connection has
been able to do scripting since it's early days in '95. There have been
changes over the years with full ASP style syntax added a couple of years
back.

As you point out I think scripting only is a bad choice for applications,
because it's an inherently bad design metaphor that mixes business logic
with display logic. Unless you extensively rely on objects in the scripts
scripting is problematic.

However, I personally use what I consider 'templates' rather than scripts.
HTML is just easier and cleaner to be set up in an HTML page rather than
generated through code. My preferred mechanism for building HTML interfaces
is this:

* Fire code in the backend server that performs the business logic
* Pass control to a template handler that displays template HTML page
designed with the HTML Editor du jour containing expressions to be
rendered into the page.


For me personally this is by far the most productive mechanism for buidling
applications as I can do the real processing in VFP (in the case of WC at
least interactively - in the case of COM not so much) then have the HTML
handled through standard HTML mechanisms.

IOW, it gets me the best of both worlds.