>There's quite a few Mere Mortals developers who are using West Wind with lots of success...both thin and fat client. West Wind has other goodies that allow you to use the Internet as your "network" for passing data across the wire. I recommend checking out Rick's web site for details.
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>Regards,


Kevin, would you be willing to expound on this interesting approach a little more? How does this change some of the basic Codebook assumptions?

I've read the Westwind papers so I'm just asking you to talk about your (MM) end of things.

For instance, I could imagine that the server would ship a requested working set of records for selected tables to the client via XML where they would be re-assembled as cursors. Updates would be done to the cursors (which don't utilize buffers AFAIK). When the user hit the save button the modified cursors would be bundled up and shipped back to the server.

For example, one of my forms updates five tables:
FAMILY (one record, names of one or two spouses) [What's the sound of one spouse arguing?]
PERSON (one record each)
ADDRSS (one or more)
PHONES (zero or more)
EMAIL (zero or more)

The form can change existing records, add new ones, or delete old ones. Nothing changes permanently until the save is performed. Of course, currently all of this is done with optimistic buffering.

As well as sending the updated XML, I imagine that one would either need to ship back the original XML for the five tables or have the server maintain a copy. This would enable the server to determine exactly which fields were changed and which records were new.

The server would apply final business rules and, if all was ok, update the database. If not ok, the server would need to send a list of violations to the client. The server could store its data in VFP tables or in a back-end DB.

I may be off-base here. Please shed some light.

Peter Robinson