> Have you heard anything from Vlad about his project?

Jeffrey, see thread 273535 for the last dialogue I had with Vlad.

The upshot, as I understand it, is that the project was successfull but didn't involve VFP. You might call it a proof of concept that a Java front-end can offer many of the UI features that we are used to.

Here is a sample from his last post in that thread (1999/10/12):

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>-What versions of Java (compiler) are you using?

Symantec Visual Cafe 2.1. The compiler is an exceptional one. Extremly fast and the generated code is also fast and reliable. The development environment is average.

This Visual Cafe version implements the Java 1.1 standard.

>-You are not using Java scrip?

Just a few pieces of Java script in some asp pages. Java script is very far from Java.

>-Regarding the framework you are using, what is the origin ( from where ).

I developed my own framework based on the standard java.awt package/framework. Java.awt comes from Sun, but it's a standard class library in Java (ie any Java implementation must contain java.awt).

We also use some Symantec classes (TreeView, TabPanel, etc). These classes are also based on java.awt, but, they are rather poorly design and implemented.

>-Is this framework the most common for Web development?

I don't have any statistics, so, I can't really answer your question. Basically, there are two main frameworks from Sun: awt and Swing. Swing is newer and it was not finished when we started to develop our framework.
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(Peter again.)

At this point I am most interested in moving towards a VFP middleware program talking to VFP clients on the front-end and (optionally) a SQL database on the backend.

As I understand it the VFP-VFP connection would either be DCOM or straight HTTP passing data sets back and forth (possibly XML). Data transfer could be over a LAN or over the Internet or both.

It appears to me that none of the standard frameworks are optimized to do this. You would essentially need two quite different frameworks, one for the middleware and one for the client/UI.

I'm looking for real-world examples. Actually, I may have one right here at the resort I contract for. It a ski-ticket system written in VFP by Siriusware. I haven't had time to check it out but I understand that they are running VFP middleware under MTS with a DCOM connection. The VFP clients can operate stand-alone for a while with no connection to the middleware.

Peter