>Has anyone been using MacroMedia's Drumbeat 2000 for data access to VFP data for Web applications? I noticed that MicroMega Systems, the makers of FoxFire, are providing training. Since they seem like primarily VFP developers, I thought.....
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>TIA

Drumbeat is an ASP framework. In ASP, you have two choices for accessing data: using ADO, or using another COM object that wraps data access for you. VFP has an ODBC driver that allows you to connect to VFP data with the OLEDB provider for ODBC sources, but you should keep in mind that VFP is NOT a server database, and this becomes obvious when trying to access its data remotely. The lack of features and speed in the VFP ODBC driver will be a hinderance in any decent sized web effort.

This is not to say that VFP data is not for use with ASP- on the contrary, one of the best web app combinations, IMO, is ASP calling VFP COM objects that access VFP data. But that's not how Drumbeat works. Drumbeat's data access is largely wizard driven, and you end up getting at all of your data through ADO (and therefore, the VFP ODBC driver). Unless I am mistaken, Drumbeat does not easily allow integration with external COM objects, and the framework expects that most of your HTML generation will take place in your ASP pages.

I have read a lot of frustrations from other developers complaining about the lack of flexibility you get when building a Drumbeat app. (I have nenver developed an app with it, only seen and played with the HTML editor, which by the way, is very nice). A ton of the complexity of a data driven website is hidden from the developer by the wizards and builders. As you know these sorts of tools can be a blessing and a curse. The beginning programmer will find them invaluable for tackling the basic tasks that he needs to do, but a more advanced programmer will eventually end up throwing away all of the functionality in a trade for flexibility and his own tools and techniques.

The beauty of VFP data is native access. If you can't have native access, and use the native DML, what's the point? If have to access data in a C/S scenario, use a server database.